Why is dissonance noisy?
Nature explores the strange mathematics of yuck – the neurological reason why we find dissonant music hard to listen to: Consonant chords are, roughly speaking, […]
Articles by grant
‘The Bloop’ identified.
I’m not sure when this happened, but NOAA thinks they’ve finally identified the mysterious underwater sound known as ‘The Bloop’: The broad spectrum sounds recorded […]
Confined to a wheelchair, but still rides a bike…
Guardian has some unusual insight into the human brain, thanks to a man whose Parkinson’s has left him confined to a wheelchair, but who is […]
Science Art: World’s Weirdest: Seagulls Help Sunfish, National Geographic.
Nothing about sunfish is as striking as watching them move. [via]
NASA beefs up security after laptop theft.
ITProPortal.com reports on a heightened state of alert in the halls of the government offices in charge of the very biggest missiles there are… because […]
What does the zombie-making fungus fear? Its own parasite.
Science Tech Daily says in the parasite world, it’s turtles all the way down. No matter how much of a *parasite* you are… like the […]
Supersymmetry sideswiped. (“No, it doesn’t work that way!” says LHC.)
BBC reports that the Large Hadron Collider is messing up a perfectly neat theory about how the universe fits together: Supersymmetry, or SUSY, has gained […]
Bizarre penis shaved by scientists
I can’t beat Science Nordic’s headline. They’re talking about some tragically vicious beetle anatomy: The many spines on the penis are just as nasty, sharp […]
Old process makes new fuels. By turning sugar into diesel.
UC Berkeley looks back to an old (and abandoned) method for making explosives and tweaks it to make renewable biofuels: Campus chemists and chemical engineers […]
Science Art: Aardvark (Kapisches Erdferkel, Orycteropus capensis Gm. S. 147), from Brehm’s Tierleben, 1927
We’ve talked before about Alfred Brehm. These are his aardvarks. Earth-pigs. After “trek,” one of the best-known Afrikaans words to make it into English. Literally, […]
Little things. Big pictures.
Nikon (through Wired) presents some of the most amazing windows onto the microscopic world ever seen: Super-close-ups of garlic, snail fossils, stinging nettle, bat embryos, […]
Egyptian princess found. (Not alive.)
PhysOrg has the details on the latest royal presence in Cairo: Czech archaeologists have unearthed the 4,500-year-old tomb of a Pharaonic princess south of Cairo, […]
Cold planet Mars.
Nature reveals a setback in the search for life on Mars. We’re learning more about the atmosphere there, and there doesn’t seem to be enough […]
SONG: Cloudbusting (by Kate Bush) (a penitential cover)
SONG: “Cloudbusting” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: This is a penitential cover. I was late with the last song. This […]
Science Art: Fig. 2, A detailed view of Earth’s magnetosphere… from Earth Orbital Science, Space in the Seventies by WR Corliss, 1971.
We had big plans then, two years after we’d landed on the Moon. We had to be prepared. found on archive.org (pdf).