Science Art: Matsaki Polychrome Bowls of Shape 2, from The Excavation of Hawikuh, 1966.
Pottery charts are cool. This expedition report is full of ’em.
Science
A spacecraft thinner than a human hair can clean up space junk
Popular Science gets the skinny on a super-thin satellite that cleans up the metal messes we leave in orbit: This past spring, the NIAC awarded […]
An AI has learned to play go… without being taught by humans.
Nature explains an artificial-intelligence breakthrough, with a computer that’s learned how to win at the complicated Asian game of go without studying the strategies and […]
Tiangong-1 is falling to Earth.
But, The Guardian says, we don’t have to worry about death by 8.5 tons of space junk – probably: China’s space agency has since notified […]
Stop your smartphone from hijacking your brain.
Popular Science wants to help you break the smartphone habit: “When we let ourselves space out and let our minds wander,” [Manoush] Zomordoi writes, “we […]
The birth of city-states (and government itself) didn’t happen like we thought.
New Scientist reviews research that shows the first governments weren’t born as a consequence of agriculture. Instead, they might have had more to do with […]
Science Art: Plate C from The rotifera; or, Wheel-animalcules, both British and foreign, 1889
Click to embiggen Teeny tiny critters, hanging out in the water. They’ve got cilia in a circle, waving around their tops as if they were […]
Your brain’s mapmaker never, ever sleeps.
Science News reports on studies that find the parts of your brain in charge of navigation never rests, even when you’re asleep: Nestled in a […]
Navajo nation might just let geneticists study them after all.
Nature has more on Navajo leaders – in charge of the second-largest Native American group in the U.S. – possibly ending 15 years of forbidding […]
Science Art: Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, by Landsat 8
Click to embiggen vastly The USGS Earth Explorer program shared these before-and-after pictures of Puerto Rico. The main difference that’s visible from the Landsat 8 […]
Battery charging got 20 times faster – by adding asphalt.
NextBigFuture bigs up the Rice University researchers who added a pinch of asphalt and graphene to their batteries to create a high-capacity power source that […]
Human-triggered earthquakes – how do we know?
Nature is following the geologists who are tracking, for the first time, the impressive number of – and factors involved in –earthquakes believed to be […]
Tropical rainforests have become carbon *producers*, not carbon sinks.
Nature, reporting on the effects of droughts and logging, reveals that the world’s jungles are now producing more CO2 than they’re socking away out of […]
Science Art: Puer Capite Elephantino…. from Gaspar Schott, 1662.
I was going to post something else here, but then I saw this on nemfrog this morning and had to share. It’s the Elephant-Headed Boy […]
GMO wheat is gluten free. (Hard choices, right?)
New Scientist reports with hope for celiac-disease sufferers on a new breed of wheat that’s genetically modified not to produce inflammation-causing gluten: Gluten is the […]