Growing worry over “ChatGPT-induced psychosis”
Futurism reports on anecdotal evidence of ChatGPT conversing with people in a human-like way and … drawing them further and further into an authoritative-sounding, real-feeling […]
Science
NASA JPL boss quits
The Register reports on the director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory suddenly stepping down for “personal reasons”: During the November 2024 staff cuts, Leshin cautioned: […]
Pulsars have an invisible halo
Physics Magazine takes a look at the radiation surrounding those high-energy stars that zoot-zoot-zoot out in regularly recurring intervals (stars with a pulse, in other […]
Science Art: MRO Fairing Installation, 2005.
On a fiberglass sailboat, “fairing” is a thin coat of epoxy meant to smooth out all tiny bumps and creases that sanding can’t catch in […]
Science Art: Iceland’s Coast Shows Hints of Spring, March 2024
A photo from the NASA PACE Ocean Sciences gallery. The Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem mission is a satellite observatory created by Goddard Space Flight […]
Our butts used to be sperm dispensers.
Science Alert reports on an evolutionary study that has found our butts (from which everybody, as the children’s book tells us, poops) were originally a […]
A new color, named “olo.”
BBC reports on an odd optical experiment that resulted in human eyes seeing an entirely new color, a kind of super-saturated aqua they’ve dubbed “olo”: […]
Science Art: Woltmann’s Tachometer, 1882
Oh, hydrology. This is a device to measure the speed of water flow, as described in A practical treatise on hydraulic and water-supply engineering: relating […]
Nearby galaxies are shredding each other.
BBC Science Focus looks up at the heavens and sees two nearby galaxies — the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) — […]
Too much space junk.
The European Space Agency has an unfortunate report about future satellites. They’re much closer to running out of room because, as Science Alert puts it, […]
Science Art: Mathematical Knot Table 01, by Rodrigo Argenton
These are knots. Not knots used to tie down boats or headstrong horses, but knots used to explore geometries of space. The display was made […]
A mysterious trilobite cousin deciphered.
For a long while, paleontologists have been trying to figure out what was up with Helmetia expansa, a prehistoric creature from before the dinosaurs that […]
Intelligence evolved at least twice on Earth.
In science-nerd circles, people lately have been really into talking about how many times crabs evolve — that is, how many unrelated invertebrate families wind […]
Science Art: Portuguese Man-Of-War, Tongued Sarsia, by Philip Henry Gosse
This image comes from Philip Henry Gosse’s A Year at the Shore, specifically, the month of October. (The year isn’t specified, but the book was […]
Science Art: Periophthalmus koelreuteri, 1942.
This is a mudskipper who is being drawn here solely for the qualities of its bulbous, beautiful eyes. The illustration is from page 453 of […]