Just discovered: world’s tiniest reptile.
Science News shows off a critter from Madagascar that is very small, yet enormously cute. You have to see this. Click the link to meet […]
Articles by grant
China’s Mars probe is sending back pictures.
Popular Science shares a postcard of Mars taken up-close and personal by China’s Tianwen-1 probe as it enters orbit around the Red Planet: The five-ton […]
Science Art: Tackles, 1905.
Click to embiggen Pulleys and rope, arranged to make lifting heavy weights easier. I’ve been messing around with boats lately, lowering a 30-foot mast with […]
Voyager 1 has kept in touch for 40 years.
Discover reports on a dedicated little space probe that’s still writing home to NASA (using 11 vital instruments) after four decades of hurtling away from […]
“Just grow a table.”
MIT News looks at the new science of tissue engineering, taking lab-grown cells and training them to grow objects to order: It takes a lot […]
There’s a new whale in the Gulf of Mexico. A whole new species, in fact.
NPR introduces us to a 42-foot-long stranger, the Rice’s whale. The mysterious species is large in size, but small in number, hanging out in off […]
Science Art: Hunting with a Sound Camera, by William Vogt, 1933.
Click to embiggen Listen! This was how people catalogued birdsongs in the 1930s, with a giant acoustic dish. And then they transferred them to phonograph […]
Maybe mass extinctions *don’t* lead to a great flowering of new life forms.
Scientific American has looked at the fossil record and found it wanting. Instead of there being a regular pattern of mass extinctions (like the death […]
Lobster-shell patterns make concrete stronger.
Reuters reveals a new technique to strengthen ordinary concrete by imitating the criss-cross pattern of lobster shells: Reinforced with steel fibres, the concrete becomes more […]
Science Art: Coronavirus spike protein structure, by David Veesler, University of Washington,2016
Click to embiggen This is not an alien forest. It is also not a picture of the COVID19 virus. It’s an illustration from 2016 of […]
SONG: In the Albatross Museum.
SONG: “In the Albatross Museum” ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on Science Friday, 8 Jan 2021, “Giant, Toothed Birds Once Ruled The Skies”, as used in […]
Counting elephants from space: satellite conservation.
The BBC reports on a new use for space hardware: training computers to count elephant populations from 370 miles overhead to keep them from hurtling […]
The toothy mega-albatross
Science Friday remembers the mysteriously vanished pelagornithids – birds that, we now know, once ruled the skies with toothy beaks and a wingspan twice the […]
Science Art: Cloud Vortices off Isla Socorro (Detail) by NASA Goddard Photo and Video
Click to embiggen On May 25, 2010 at 17 :35 UTC, this was the weather off the North Pacific island called Isla Socorro: Partly cloudy […]
Our oldest art is a picture of a pig.
The Guardian (among other sources) reports on cave paintings on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi that push back the earliest known art made by Homo […]