App-driven gig-economy nurses.
The Markup looks at what it’s like when you start hiring nurses the way you catch a ride from Uber: Gig nursing apps have become […]
Science
Science Art: Avro Canada VZ-9AV Avrocar.
This is not a movie prop, but a working prototype of the Avrocar, a disc-shaped flying machine that graced the skies between 1959 and 1961. […]
Faces appear as the Amazon gets low.
CNN had a report on the resurfacing of 2,000-year-old carved faces in the stony banks of a stretch of the Amazon River, which have peeked […]
Science Art: Turner +2: The Best CB Microphone in the World, 1966.
This is an ad from the April 1966 “Tools and Test Measurement Issue” of Popular Electronics, which I found on archive.org. Lovely design on this […]
AI is reading scrolls burned in Vesuvius.
The Guardian looks back at a carbonized papyrus scorched by the lava that consumed Pompeii. University of Kentucky computer scientists have been able to decipher […]
Exercise scientists: women hunted, men gathered
Scientific American upends the old idea that manly men evolved to hunt for meat for growing prehistoric families with physiological evidence that women – who […]
Robot warships hitting targets in the open sea.
Popular Science reported on “ghost ships,” a.k.a. USVs (Unmanned Sea Vehicles), passing their latest targeting tests on maneuvers in the Middle East: The tests, dubbed […]
Science Art: Diagram illustrating the inherent conspicuousness of an eye-spot…, Cott, 1942.
An illustration showing how noticeable an eye actually is, from the text The Vertebrate Eye and Its Adaptive Radiation, which looks at eyes, eyes everywhere, […]
Science Art: Altitude and azimuth instrument, 1876.
How high? This device will tell you. It’s from The great Centennial exhibition critically described and illustrated, by Phillip T. Sandhurst, which you can read […]
Roman glass became photonic crystal
Physics Magazine joins Tufts University researcher Giulia Guidetti who has studied a glass shard that was broken and buried shortly after 100 B.C.E. that over […]
Science Art: Sea Sirens, by A.A. Jansson, 1930.
“The efforts made by oversober scientists to reduce such marvels to coldly reasonable origins have in a few specific cases been only too successful,” wrote […]
Stone Age flip-flops
PhysOrg reports on Witwatersrand researchers who’ve found tracks left by prehistoric footwear – a pair of flip-flop sandals that go back at least 75,000 years, […]
Neolithic engineers
The Guardian visits a huge, 5,000-year-old tomb complex on Scotland’s Orkney Isles that reveals a surprisingly sophisticated level of engineering know-how: The tomb measures more […]
Fossil antibiotics
Stat covers a medicine-making strategy right out of Jurassic Park, with a UPenn researcher named Cesar de la Fuente, who is looking for protein-chains called […]