We just sent a message to a habitable planet.
New Scientist explains that the recipients, if there are any, could answer in about 25 years – enough time for a radio message to travel […]
Science
FDA OKs putting tracking devices in schizophrenia pills. (Yes. They really did.)
New York Times has the latest high-water mark in our society’s ever-rising tide of irony – an antipsychotic medication that, as paranoid as this sounds, […]
Science Art: Representations of the Braid Groups by Nancy Scherich, overall winner, Dance Your Ph.D. 2017.
“A representation is faithful if it has only one braid in its kernel.” So, this is doctorate-level mathematics rendered as interpretative dance, and that is […]
Alzheimer’s protein can travel from the blood up to the brain.
Science News shares new research about how Alzheimer’s can happen – and, maybe, how we can prevent it. Those amyloid proteins that build up in […]
Florida Man kills Clovis-First Hypothesis – with a few buddies on boats.
Ars Technica sums up research that kills the idea that the first Americans walked over Arctic ice from Russia. Instead, it really looks like humans […]
Science Art: Ordo Fecundus (Steinfurz und Flidermaus), 1553
Click to embiggen slightly An owl and a bat, in German and Latin, as presented by Conrad Gessner in Icones Animalium Quadruped Viviparorum et Oviparorum. […]
Half-blimp, half-plane flying machine built with safety in mind.
Popular Science introduces us to “The Plimp,” a vehicle that hopes to be a nearly unsinkable aircraft: With a rigid, winged body held underneath a […]
Laugh at the T. rex’s tiny arms… as they shred your frail body just like they were designed to.
Science News brings a new(-ish) perspective on the atrophied forelimbs of Tyrannosaurus rex. Those little arms were perfectly built for close-quarters slashing of prey: [T]he […]
Killing old age by killing off undying cells.
Nature‘s report seems backwards, but there it is. Researchers have found a key to reversing old age is to kill off certain decrepit cells that […]
Science Art: When (Neutron) Stars Collide, by NASA
Click to embiggen There’s not much information on the NASA Image of the Day site explaining how this visualization was made. It’s meant to show […]
Quickie-prescription startup wants to market stage-fright pills.
Stat News has some weird news at the intersection of business and pharmacology – a new company wants to sell a beta-blocker used for blood […]
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.
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 […]