Titan is making DNA. Or could be.
The Daily Galaxy says Saturn’s big moon, Titan, could be a life-making machine: Saturn’s moon Titan has many of the components for life without liquid […]
Articles by grant
Monday’s no worse than Tuesday, say grim-faced scientists.
BBC dispels the myth that Monday’s any more miserable than any other weekday (with the exception, of course, of Friday): US investigators who looked at […]
Science Art: Orbits of the Planets by Asa Smith, 1850
This hypnotic image seems to have traveled out of Asa Smith’s book, into David Rumsey’s cartography collection and from there into a Zazzle poster collection […]
Mutant butterflies of Fukushima.
Tecca reports on the 50 percent mutation rate in insects near the nuclear site: Tens of thousands of residents were displaced and officials assured the […]
Bill Gates to build a better toilet.
Mac fans should have a *field day* coming up with headlines for this ABC.net.au piece on Bill Gates’ noble new quest – to reinvent the […]
Heroin: now with all the pain relief, and none of the addiction.
That’s the tempting pitch made by a team from the University of Adelaide and University of Colorado, who’ve come up with a way to block […]
New species discovered… on Flickr.
NPR takes a close look at an eye-catching insect… a new species of lacewing entomologists discovered on Flickr: [Shaun] Winterton, a senior entomologist at the […]
Spider web glass protects birds on the Holy Island
I can’t outdo the BBC’s headline on this story about a beautiful application for a strange, new material: A lookout tower at Lindisfarne has installed […]
Science Art: Reptile Skeletons and Skulls, from Allgemeine Naturgeschichte für alle Stände, 1835
They look even more reptilian from the *inside*. This image was part of one of those wonderful 19th-century German encyclopedias, but I found it in […]
If you were an MIT math student, you’d fix the lottery too.
Boston Globe blows the lid off an M.I.T. syndicate that appears to have made a cool $8 million fixing the lottery: [Massachusetts Inspector General Gregory […]
Caffeine Junkies of the Lost Metropolis
Wired (suitably enough) gets all hepped up over traces of a prehistoric Starbucks in Cahokia: In a new study, researchers have found the first direct […]
Not quite video games for elderly brains, but almost.
Laboratory Equipment explores “brain fitness programs” and the way computer games can boost seniors’ memory and alertness: The [UCLA] team studied 59 participants with an […]
Antarctic rainforest ready to be reborn.
The Bangkok Post unearths the forgotten past of the lush, humid Antarctic jungle: The study of sediment cores drilled from the ocean floor off Antarctica’s […]
Curiosity is on Mars
The rovers don’t seem to have the same way with words that Neil Armstrong did. From Curiosity’s twitter feed: “I’m safely on the surface of […]
Science Art: Fig. 68, The Two-Toed Sloth, American Types of Animal Life, 1893.
A contented sloth peers out of the pages of St. George Mivart’s American Varieties of Animal Life. I have no idea who the artist is, […]