Was it beer, or was it bread? Made for the living or made for the dead?
Discover pulls back the curtain on an archaeological debate over some pits in the ground in Israel – holes that show traces of 13,000-year-old fermentation […]
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A piece of human brain survived 2,600 years.
Science magazine reveals the secret to cellular survival for a chunk of human brain that didn’t rot for more than two and half millennia after […]
Farfarout is as far, far out as you can get (and still be in the Solar System).
NSF’s NOIRLab looks at a body that the Gemini Observatory spotted in 2018 and that astronomers working at Hawaii’s Subaru telescope nicknamed Farfarout. Now, they’ve […]
Science Art: Ingenuity Mars helicopter, by NASA/JPL-Caltech
Next week, on February 18, this little chopper will touch down on Mars with the Perseverance rover. Then, a little while later, it’ll take off […]
Alpha Centauri’s possible planet: a warm Neptune, a very large Earth.
Scientific American wonders whether we’ve just spotted a new planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, our sun’s nearest neighbor. If it’s there, that potential planet is in […]
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 […]
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 […]