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 […]
Articles by grant
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 […]
Cicadas are so loud, they cause fiberoptic-cable interference.
Wired reveals a very strange insect-monitoring device called DAS, or “distributed acoustic sensing,” normally used to track vibrations made by seismic shifts and volcanic eruptions. […]
Micro-napping champions: chinstrap penguins
Yes, you read that correctly. Science News reports on an unusual distinction in the natural world. Chinstrap penguins manage to net a total of 11 […]
App-driven gig-economy nurses.
The Markup looks at what it’s like when you start hiring nurses the way you catch a ride from Uber: Gig nursing apps have become […]
Science Art: Avro Canada VZ-9AV Avrocar.
This is not a movie prop, but a working prototype of the Avrocar, a disc-shaped flying machine that graced the skies between 1959 and 1961. […]
Faces appear as the Amazon gets low.
CNN had a report on the resurfacing of 2,000-year-old carved faces in the stony banks of a stretch of the Amazon River, which have peeked […]
No other song today
Thinking I could get anything decent done in four days was probably overly optimistic… but there’s something *mostly* done. More science to follow.
SONG: Fine Altar Stone
SONG: “Fine Altar Stone”. (available as .ogg here) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on IFL Science, 25 Sep 2023, “The Stonehenge Altar Stone Didn’t Come From […]
Science Art: Turner +2: The Best CB Microphone in the World, 1966.
This is an ad from the April 1966 “Tools and Test Measurement Issue” of Popular Electronics, which I found on archive.org. Lovely design on this […]
AI is reading scrolls burned in Vesuvius.
The Guardian looks back at a carbonized papyrus scorched by the lava that consumed Pompeii. University of Kentucky computer scientists have been able to decipher […]
Exercise scientists: women hunted, men gathered
Scientific American upends the old idea that manly men evolved to hunt for meat for growing prehistoric families with physiological evidence that women – who […]
Robot warships hitting targets in the open sea.
Popular Science reported on “ghost ships,” a.k.a. USVs (Unmanned Sea Vehicles), passing their latest targeting tests on maneuvers in the Middle East: The tests, dubbed […]
Science Art: Diagram illustrating the inherent conspicuousness of an eye-spot…, Cott, 1942.
An illustration showing how noticeable an eye actually is, from the text The Vertebrate Eye and Its Adaptive Radiation, which looks at eyes, eyes everywhere, […]
SONG: “Communications” (a penitential Slim Gaillard cover)
SONG: “Communications” (a penitential Slim Gaillard cover). (available as .ogg here) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: This isn’t based on any research. It’s a cover of a […]