Maybe mass extinctions *don’t* lead to a great flowering of new life forms.
Scientific American has looked at the fossil record and found it wanting. Instead of there being a regular pattern of mass extinctions (like the death […]
Month: January 2021
Lobster-shell patterns make concrete stronger.
Reuters reveals a new technique to strengthen ordinary concrete by imitating the criss-cross pattern of lobster shells: Reinforced with steel fibres, the concrete becomes more […]
Science Art: Coronavirus spike protein structure, by David Veesler, University of Washington,2016
Click to embiggen This is not an alien forest. It is also not a picture of the COVID19 virus. It’s an illustration from 2016 of […]
SONG: In the Albatross Museum.
SONG: “In the Albatross Museum” [Download] ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on Science Friday, 8 Jan 2021, “Giant, Toothed Birds Once Ruled The Skies”, as used […]
Counting elephants from space: satellite conservation.
The BBC reports on a new use for space hardware: training computers to count elephant populations from 370 miles overhead to keep them from hurtling […]
The toothy mega-albatross
Science Friday remembers the mysteriously vanished pelagornithids – birds that, we now know, once ruled the skies with toothy beaks and a wingspan twice the […]
Science Art: Cloud Vortices off Isla Socorro (Detail) by NASA Goddard Photo and Video
Click to embiggen On May 25, 2010 at 17 :35 UTC, this was the weather off the North Pacific island called Isla Socorro: Partly cloudy […]
Our oldest art is a picture of a pig.
The Guardian (among other sources) reports on cave paintings on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi that push back the earliest known art made by Homo […]
A pacemaker for your brain.
Discover surveys the state of the research into deep-brain stimulation (DBS), using electrical implants to treat conditions from Parkinson’s to chronic pain, OCD, depression and […]
Science Art: Gryllus: Gryllus formosus, Gryllus hirtipes, Gryllus trifasciatus.
Handsome field crickets. That’s not a name for them, just me admiring them. Gryllus is a genus of field crickets. Once, they were all put […]
Baby bees keep their moms up all night, too.
Scientific American‘s 60-Second Science recently covered the neurology of parenthood, revealing how sleep deprivation for caregivers extends to insects as well: Researchers found that worker […]
Salome’s dance floor – where John the Baptist was condemned to death – has been uncovered. We think.
LiveScience brings together sordid incestuous subtext, capital punishment, judicial critique, scripture, Oscar Wilde, and of course archaeology in a single story of an excavation on […]
Science Art: Perihelion Parts of Orbits of the August and November Meteor-showers
Click to embiggen Where the meteors come from in August and November, as pictured in A new astronomy for beginners, 1898, as found on archive.org. […]
The same genes that protect against Ebola also protect against COVID-19.
The Scientist has some satisfying news to ring in the New Year. The same genetic mechanism that boosts immunity to one lethal pandemic – the […]