Science Art: Britannia Co.’s Patent Screwing Machine, 1890.
“Screws at one single cut,” the ad boasts. This is an ad from the front of The Engineer’s Sketch-Book of Mechanical Movements, by Thomas W. […]
Articles by grant
Solar panels increase crop yields, insulate reservoirs, and can help farmers.
PNAS reports on some unanticipated consequences of solar farming – but things that banks of solar panels that are unexpectedly good, not bad: To generate […]
Kerala temple introduces a robot ritual elephant.
BBC reports on a mechanical elephant that is replacing a flesh-and-blood elephant that previously conducted rituals in a temple in Kerala, India: The initiative by […]
How a ballerina spins, as a neurophysical phenomenon.
The journal Human Movement Science carries research from Swiss sports scientists who have used ballet dancers to figure out how it can be possible for […]
Science Art: Evibacus princeps, 2019
It’s a wickle baby slipper lobster! That color came from it being prepared on a slide so it could be examined under a microscope. The […]
No song today.
Another penitential cover will be forthcoming. I’m a tired man.
An AI fighter plane has taken off, engaged a simulated enemy and landed without a human pilot’s help.
DARPA reports on the Air Combat Evolution program’s newest breakthrough, which took a regular F-16 fighter jet, equipped it with an Artificial Intelligence program capable […]
Science Art: Mimodactylus in life, 2019.
This is a painting of Mimodactylus libanensis soaring over what Nature (where it was first published) called “Afro-Arabia,” a continent that existed many millions of […]
Australian whales looking for mates have given up singing and taken up fighting.
EurekAlert shares a University of Queensland study that shows a turn to violence among courting whales along Australia’s eastern seaboard. Whales seeking mates are giving […]
NASA astronaut finally ready to spend more than a year in space.
Ars Technica reports on a long-awaited milestone. After many not-quite-that-long missions, a NASA astronaut is on the way to finally spend more than a full […]
Science Art: Test Apparatus, 1960
A test apparatus, as used for the article “Modification of Force Feed Lubricators” in the 1960-05 edition of Lubrication Engineering. The idea was to study […]
We can get back to the night sky. But it will take work.
Ars Technica reports on the ongoing blotting out of the stars at night, with artificial light pollution doubling in the last 10 years alone. There […]
Vikings brought animals to England, radioactive analysis shows.
Science News looks at a Viking burial site in England where animals were buried alongside humans, and finds that radioactive traces show these critters traveled […]
Science Art: Deceleration of Mars Science Laboratory in Martian Atmosphere, 2011
An image from NASA/JPL-Caltech depicting a capsule starting to slow down in the Martian atmosphere. All we see is the outer structure, which seems mostly […]
Researchers: one police stop makes a person less likely to vote.
Bolts magazine has an article by one of the researchers published in American Political Science Review who found that police interactions directly correlate with lower […]