Real money. Virtual currency. Hard rules.
New Scientist adds up the arguments over bitcoins, the computer-generated form of money. We’re now seeing plans to regulate the imaginary currency: Virtual currencies are […]
Articles by grant
Why is there something? Anything? Instead of nothing?
NPR asks the biggest question of all – the original question. Look around. Why is there something instead of nothing?: The best answer we have […]
Science Art: Plate VI, from Monograph on the Aye-aye, by Richard Owen, 1863
In 1863, naturalist Richard Owen published 72 pages of joy. Is it related to the lemur? Aye. Does it climb through the jungle at night? […]
Psychedelic sponges. Why?
Vice, of all publications, examines the strange chemistry of the first-known psychedelic sponges… trying to figure out why sponges would make something as potent as […]
After everything, the Higgs boson still dooms us all. In a few billion years.
Scientific American crunches the numbers that show how the mass of the Higgs boson spells the end of the universe… eventually: “If you use all […]
The power of diagrams. The beauty of diagrams.
SciAm blogger Clarissa Ai Ling Lee reflects on the science and art of visualizing information: Of course, there were records of politics, observations of particular […]
Lockheed Martin’s quantum computer steps into the limelight.
New York Times has a pretty good profile of what could be the next big breakthrough in computing – the chips that understand “maybe”: [A] […]
Science Art: Plate 2527 Guarda (a mechanism for protecting airships), by Charles A.A. Dellschau, 1912.
Click to embiggen This may be an important historical record of the early days of aeronautics, or it may be a vivid fantasy by a […]
SONG: “So Heavy”
SONG: “So Heavy” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on “Super-dense celestial bodies could be a new kind of planet,” […]
Earthquakes make instant gold.
OK, well, instant veins of gold, at least. The gold, Nature says, is in the ground already. But it takes an earthquake to make it […]
Cars shape sparrows’ evolution.
Nature demonstrates how (possibly) our machines are transforming birds’ whole existence: Roadside-nesting cliff swallows have evolved shorter, more manoeuvrable wings, which may have helped them […]
Giant squid CLONE ARMY. Or, well, at least a tight family.
BBC reveals that giant squid, no matter where they’re found or how different from each other they look, are all genetically really close to one […]
Artificial stem cells make new blood.
One step closer to androids. That’s where scilogs is bringing us. Making a blood supply for bioengineered organs from scratch: Starting off with fibroblasts…, widespread […]
Lasers made of sound. Call them… phasers.
Wired reveals the weird ways nanotechnologists are making sound behave like light… this time, by creating a Star Trek weapon in the lab: Because laser […]
Science Art: Frutti di Mare, by W.F. Phillips, 1974.
Click to embiggen I couldn’t resist this when I saw the name of the book it came from: Italian Food, by Elizabeth David. It’s an […]