Science Art: A section through the cochlea in the line of its axis, 1910.
Click to embiggen An inner ear, dear, from The human body; an account of its structure and activities and the conditions of its healthy working, […]
Articles by grant
No song yet
Words are hard. It’s everything but words. Soon, soon.
Betelgeuse, the cannibal.
“Bad Astronomer” Phil Plait, over at SyFy.com, explains a new study that demonstrates how the red giant Betelgeuse might have gotten so big – by […]
New COVID hypothesis: not bat meat, but bat mines.
Guano mining is a real thing, and a really fascinating thing. And sometimes a really dangerous thing, too. The Bioscience Resource Project revisits the case […]
Science Art: Mechanische Maschinen und Automaten 49, from Bellicorum instrumentorum liber cum …, 1420-1430
This is something I first assumed was a very early typewriter or printing press, from the Bavarian State Library’s copy of Bellicorum instrumentorum liber cum […]
Help track satellites (for astronomers worried that they’re starting to block out the stars.)
Satellite Streak Watcher is a project on the AnecData citizen science site that asks anyone with a cell phone to take a picture of the […]
There are campfires on the Sun.
Science Daily shares some of the discoveries from the first images of the Solar Orbiter mission – including the presence of “mini-flares” that astronomers have […]
Radio telescopes have spotted four very strange… things.
LiveScience has more on the entirely new, bright-edged circular objects, the so-called “odd radio circles” or ORCs that astronomers are struggling to figure out: In […]
Science Art: From Here, a number of broken gifts for the carpenters and lovers…., by Lorenz Stöer, 1567.
Click to embiggen The title here is the best I could render from the middle German “Hier Inn etliche zerbrochne Gebew, den Schreinern in eingelegter […]
LSD use is rising among older folks – and it’s probably because people are looking for a way out. Even if it’s way out.
Scientific American analyzes the rise in LSD use and finds that it’s probably an attempt to lighten up – or at least get a new […]
Turning the virus into a videogame.
Ireland’s RTÉ Brainstorm reveals how researchers are turning ordinary personal computers into a virus-killing supercomputer and recruiting gamers to solve puzzles that figure out COVID-19 […]
Smell makes music inside our brains. Each aroma, a different melody.
Scientific American organizes some notes on the neurology of scent, with experiments that show the brain distinguishes between similar scents in the same way we […]
Science Art: Structures of Brain (Взаиморасположение структур мозга – зрительный анализатор), by Coxer
Click to embiggen A brain with its structures, including the eyes and the olfactory bulb, labeled in Russian. The thinking part. Found on Wikimedia Commons.
Maybe ‘Oumuamua was a hydrogen iceberg. Not a comet. Not an asteroid. Hydrogen.
Scientific American has an unexpected explanation for the mysterious interstellar object dubbed “‘Oumuamua” that drifted into our solar system in 2017. Maybe the monolithic object […]
Best COVID outcomes were where people stayed home on their own, cell phone data shows.
The Lancet looks at pandemic spread in the U.S. and finds that the places that seem to respond the best took precautions and stayed home […]