Voyager 1, the world’s most faraway space probe, is sending back weird signals.
Space.com is calling the mysterious set of signals a “telemetry issue,” and experts say it shouldn’t be surprising that an interstellar ship launched 45 years […]
Month: May 2022
Science Art: Title Page, The Auk, Vol. XXXI, 1914.
The American Ornithologists’ Union published a journal called The Auk in 1914, with articles in it like “A Plea for the Conservation of the Eider,” […]
Reading the DNA from Pompeii
BBC reports on a study reassembling the genome of a man and woman preserved for centuries under the ash of Pompeii, and what the ancient […]
“Looty”: using NFTs to steal back looted African artworks, digitally.
Reuters describes the Looty Project as one man’s crusade to finance new artists in Nigeria and Benin by selling NFTs minted from 3D images of […]
No song today.
I have a great musical track, a hummed melody, a couple ideas about pseudosatellites and diddly-squat words. More when I can get some words, and […]
Science Art: Power spectrum of Siemens star with 1024 line pairs per image height, by Bautsch, 2012.
This is a Siemens star, a pattern used to calibrate optical equipment – to see how well the lens (or raster, or driver, or whatever) […]
It feels less evil the second time around.
The Journal of Experimental Psychology defines something I think we’ve all had a feeling about – that the more you encounter a bad deed (or […]
Laugh, quantum computer, laugh… in IBM’s gum tree.
Popular Science discusses what could be IBM’s quantum breakthrough – a quantum processor named “Kookaburra” that’s set to start computing in 2025: Last year, IBM […]
Science Art: “Ballon à col sinueux employé par M. Pasteur dans ses expériences contre la génération spontanée”, 1873.
This is some laboratory glassware used in Pasteur’s experiments, as illustrated in Les merveilles de l’industrie, an 1873 science book that has a marvelous gallery […]
Bats mimic buzzing hornets to scare predators away.
Science magazine reveals the first known case of a mammal mimicking insect noises, in a study that found greater mouse-eared bats imitate stinging insect buzzes […]
Pop-song paradox: What it takes to be a one-hit wonder is the opposite of what it takes to have a long career.
Science News examines the science of the Top 40, with a survey of the charts that found what goes into that first, breakthrough hit is […]
Science Art: Cover, Introduction to Transistors & Transistor Projects, 1972.
This is… well, let me just quote the preface: This book is intended to show the electronics experimenter how the transistor was developed, how it […]
Solar plane can do the job of a satellite without going into space.
CNN is covering the Skydweller, a plane powered by more than 17,000 solar panels, enabling it to stay aloft for month, doing the same work […]
Got allergic asthma? Congratulations – you’ve also got some COVID-19 protection.
Science News looks at interleukin-13, an immune-system protein linked with allergies that make it hard to breathe – and make it hard for the SARS-CoV-2 […]
Science Art: Lycidae, Plate XVIII, Edw. A. Smith, 1879
These are beetles, mostly from southern Asia except the last one, Dexoris, which is from Sierra Leone. These specific beetles became British (perhaps posthumously) and […]