Amateur astronomers find planet with four suns.
BBC has one for the planet hunters – or, indeed, for Planethunters.org, which has just discovered a truly bizarre solar system using a pretty offbeat […]
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Once-in-a-lifetime comet comes around.
Watch the skies next year, warns Scientific American, or you’ll miss something you’ll never see again: As it flares out of the distant Oort Cloud, […]
Science Art: Fig. 2 – Slit Mechanism from “The Scattering of Hydrogen Positive Rays, and the Existence of a Powerful Field of Force in the Hydrogen Molecule” by G. Thompson in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London
Click to embiggen I looked for molecules in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical and Physical Character […]
Don’t tell DeBeers: Diamond twice the size of Earth found.
AsiaOne has more on the new planet made of hot, compressed carbon: The rocky planet, called ‘55 Cancri e’, orbits a sun-like star 40 light […]
Draw your own circuits with nanotube pencils.
Extreme Tech gets right to the point of a new technology – a mechanical pencil that can draw functional electronic circuits: With MIT’s carbon nanotube […]
Scientists: You can’t trust scientists.
Fraud, reports Laboratory Equipment, is a growing problem in published research papers: A review of retractions in medical and biological peer-reviewed journals finds the percentage […]
M&M waste gives bees honey of different colors.
French beekeepers, Russia Today tells us, were mystified when their hives started producing rainbow-colored honey – but were even more concerned when they found out […]
The Force is strong in this worm.
Thrilled, Guardian is to introduce to its readers a new submarine species they’re calling the Jedi acorn worm: Yoda purpurata is one of three new […]
Science Art: Pneumatische Fundation (Senkkasten Caisson), from Meyers Konversationslexikon, 1889
A caisson is a machine for working under water. Meyers Konversations-Lexikon is a German encyclopedia. Rise, German engineers. Rise. Dive, German engineers. Dive. Image found […]
Happy birthday, Neil deGrasse Tyson
I’m taking a moment, with Archie McPhee, to celebrate the birth of a science dude. Dude!
Mighty bacteria make gold. Not a cold, gold.
Michigan State University biochemists (and science artists!) have made a germy philosopher’s stone: “Microbial alchemy is what we’re doing – transforming gold from something that […]
Half the Great Barrier Reef is gone.
And, says the Sydney Morning Herald, more than three-quarters of the reef will have vanished within a decade: A long-term investigation of the reef by […]
Electric tongue tastes proteins.
Laboratory Equipment finds a whole new depth to that umami thing. French chemists have devised an artificial tongue sensitive enough to tell the difference between […]
Eight new mammals discovered in Peru.
National Geographic reveals the night monkeys and other bizarre creatures of the 70,000 acre jungle that explorers are calling “a heaven of biodiversity”: Rarely seen […]
Science Art: Tardigrade
Click to embiggen Is it cute? It’s a tardigrade, also known as a water bear. That’s a cute name. And they’re tiny, too, which is […]