Science Art: “Get Squid Facts” street art, Philadelphia, 2022.
A friend of mine clued me into this project. It really works and I encourage you to try it. Did you know cephalopods have been […]
Articles by grant
Otters as big as lions, there were. As big as grizzly bears.
Atlas Obscura introduces us to Enhydriodon omoensis, a newly classified prehistoric otter that roamed the Omo river valley of Ethiopia, hunting its prey and weighing […]
NASA moved an asteroid.
NASA reports that the DART mission was a success. For the first time ever, human beings have changed the course of a celestial object: Analysis […]
Science Art: Reducing Apparatus, in “Phoney Patent Offizz,” The Electrical Experimenter, April 1917.
This is nerd humor from the dawn of the electric age. The “Phoney Patent Offizz” was apparently a regular column in Hugo Gernsback’s The Electrical […]
The fishers are back, in Washington at least.
The first time I heard about fishers was when I was discussing a little-known Florida cryptid, the “cracker dog-killer,” with a friend from Vermont. They […]
Legally, this Spanish lagoon is now a person, with all the rights a person has.
Science magazine reports on a bit of Indigenous philosophy that’s become a legal strategy for environmental protection. After nearly 640,000 citizens signed a petition supporting […]
In case you ever wondered, there are 20 quadrillion ants in the world. And that makes them important.
Reuters reports on a painstaking headcount that proves that for every one of the nearly 8 billion humans on Earth, there are 2.5 million ants: […]
Science Art: Pigtailed Baboon, 1811.
According to the accompanying text, this illustration depicts a baboon species “easily distinguished by its tail, which is four inches long, slender, and exactly like […]
Mammal ancestors survived a mass extinction – but got killed off by drought.
Live Science considers the fate of the shovel lizard Lystrosaurus, a plant-eating creature from 251 million years ago who survived the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, but […]
Gas flares don’t burn off as much methane as they should – to the tune of 3 million cars’ worth of pollution.
Science News looks gas flares, the open flames used to burn off leaking natural gas and to convert methane to CO2 directly at oil fields. […]
Science Art: Bunsen burner flame types, by Arthur Jan Fijałkowski (WarX).
The flame from a Bunsen burner (a standard piece of chemistry equipment; you might have used one in high school) can change color and height […]
SONG: False Social Reality
SONG: “False Social Reality”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Nature Communications 23 Aug 2022, “Americans experience a false social reality by underestimating popular climate policy support by […]
Boys (and men) are more socially isolated than girls (and women), study finds.
PsyPost reports on a study of social isolation – “the objective state of having limited social relationships or contact with others” – that found the […]
Humans domesticated animals way earlier than we thought – about 13,000 years ago at least.
Science News reports on the discovery of charred dung in Syria that has rewritten history, pushing back the date of the oldest domesticated animals by […]
Comets from the Milky Way’s other arms helped form Earth’s continents.
Science News winds back the astronomical clock to the early days of Planet Earth, when waves of comet collisions seem to have slammed the planet’s […]