Science Art: Punica Granatum, 1829
This tasty-looking fruit is from a medical text – Medical Botany: or, Illustrations and Descriptions of the Medicinal Plants of the London, Edinburgh, and Dublin […]
Month: December 2023
What makes cheddar cheese taste so good?
Forbes looks into a year-long study hoping to determine exactly what it is that makes cheddar cheese taste like cheddar and not gouda or Swiss […]
SETI talked for 20 minutes with a whale.
Mashable has an alien communication story with an aquatic twist. SETI and the Alaska Whale Foundation practiced for first contact by spending 20 minutes “conversing” […]
Science Art: Lynxes, by Louis Sargent, 1909
Two cats at dusk, growling in the snow. The nights have been long, but they’re growing shorter. May you survive your own lonely wilderness and […]
Blue Origin is back in the space business.
Ars Technica reports on a rocket launch from Jeff Bezos’ space company – the first in 15 months, after an engine failure destroyed a New […]
New hair to heal hearing
Harvard genetic researchers have struck on a novel way to restore hearing loss from damage and old age … with gene therapy that regenerated hair […]
SONG: Burning Libraries
SONG: “Burning Libraries”. (available as .ogg here) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on The Guardian, 12 Oct 2023, “Researchers use AI to read word on ancient […]
Solving the mystery of a 2,000-year-old body
BBC reports on a very, very cold case that’s been solved. A body found during roadwork, extending a highway between Cambridge and Huntington, England, has […]
Science Art: Ancient Ritual White Jade Disk of Heaven…, 1937
This is an illustration from a 1937 edition of Natural History magazine, an article called “Chinese Design.” This is a “Disk of Heaven,” or bi, […]
Japanese high schooler discovers beetle species.
The Japan Times covers a brand new (to us) prehistoric dung beetle that a high school student discovered while breaking rocks in class: During a […]
What will it mean to bring extinct animals back?
Defector, mostly a sports-and-social-commentary outlet, asks a scientific question: We’re now at a point, genetics-wise, where we’re ready to make de-extinction a real thing. But […]
Science Art: Ryan 262 Manta Ray: Program Status Report cover, 1975
This is the cover of a report on the Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical “Navy Mini-Drone (STARS),” otherwise known as the Manta Ray. It was a fiberglass […]
Probiotics to treat long covid?
I know, I know, but this is a double-blind study with around 400 hundred subjects published in The Lancet. It’s a little more technical than […]
That planet is too big.
Ars Technica reports on a bafflingly huge exoplanet spotted by the Webb Space Telescope. It’s the size of Neptune, but closely orbiting a star much […]
Science Art: Exoplanets Poster, Institute of Physics, 2023
This is a… well, it’s pretty self-explanatory, really. Unlike most of the images collected here, it’s got its own description printed right on it. These […]