The CRISPR-edited babies might have shortened lifespans.
Why? Well, as Nature explains, we’ve just found out that the same gene combination that gives HIV resistance to those kids He Jianku worked on […]
Articles by grant
Science Art: Mariner 10 issue of 1975, by Roy Gjerston
Click to embiggen Roy Gjerston was an artist who designed stamps for the US Postal Service and spaceship concept art for General Dynamics. So this […]
A genetically weaponized fungus is getting used against malaria.
PhysOrg has a report on a genetically modified fungus that is capable, if released into the wild, of using spider venom to eliminate the mosquitoes […]
The Search for Martian Fettuccine
Science Daily has word from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers, who instruct us to look for life on Mars by searching out rock formations […]
Science Art: Heart normal parasternal long axis echocardiography view by Patrick J. Lynch
Click to embiggen This is an image of an image of the heart – or at least an image of heart imaging. An echocardiogram done […]
SONG: Bodiless
SONG: “Bodiless”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Vox, 17 April 2019, “Scientists: We kept pig brains alive 10 hours after death. Bioethicists: ‘Holy shit.’,” as used in […]
Sharks are eating *songbirds*.
Science magazine demonstrates that sharks can and will eat literally anything, up to and including songbirds that live miles inland … but migrate over the […]
A computer beat doctors at diagnosing lung cancer.
The New York Times pits man against machine in a CT-scan interpretation challenge – and the machine won. An AI got fewer false positives and […]
Science Art: Skylab Artist Concept, 1972
Click to embiggen A house in space, with a big carport. Spaceport. You get the idea. From NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center: This illustration Skylab […]
Weird water might exist across the universe – as a supersolid.
Wired reveals a new way to look at the stuff life relies on – and gives a reason why it could be a lot more […]
Unearthing a secret chamber beneath Nero’s palace.
LiveScience reports on archaeologists excavating Emperor Nero’s “golden house” – his sprawling, palatial complex underneath hills near the Colosseum – who stumbled upon a vault […]
Geneticists discover what makes grocery-store tomatoes inferior (so now they can fix it).
Discover takes us into the geneticists’ kitchen, where they’ve isolated the gene that makes fresh tomatoes taste good – that’s missing from 93% of store-bought […]
Bat-winged dinosaur bemuses paleontologists
We thought we were pretty clear on how dinosaurs gradually evolved into birds, developing longer fingers, stronger feathers, and all the rest of that. Now, […]
Science Art: Plate XIV (Cosmarium species from Desmids of the United States….
Single-celled algae, magnified 500 times. They float in ponds and stream banks. I found them in the Biodiversity Heritage Library, in the Rev. Francis Wolle’s […]
SONG: Facing North
SONG: “Facing North”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Science News, 18 Mar 2019, “People can sense Earth’s magnetic field, brain waves suggest,” as used in the post […]