The smell of Venus de Milo
NPR reports on new findings for classical works of art. It’s pretty well known now that the stark white of ancient Greek marble statues was […]
Science
Krill sniff penguin poop
And, says National Geographic, it makes them take evasive maneuvers, ready to dodge their Antarctic predators: In Antarctica’s Palmer Station lab, scientists put wild-caught krill […]
AI can’t beat Pokémon
Something for your inner 12-year-old to feel superior about, as published in Ars Technica. Anthropic’s Claude AI, pretty helpful at summarizing documents and parsing transcripts, […]
Science Art: Lincoln’s Measurements, compared with “Old Americans,” 1953 (detail).
This is part of a graphic from a 1953 issue of Natural History, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s magazine. The article it’s illustrating is […]
Far side of the moon’s fiery past.
Space reveals that the far side of the moon was once a vast, glowing ocean of magma, according to samples retrieved by a Chinese lunar […]
Alcohol and cancer
Nature chats with a few researchers about something that’s been known for more than 30 years but is still not really widely accepted – that […]
Science Art: Mars, Olympus Mons near the terminator, Andrea Luck, 2025
This is the largest volcano in our solar system, as far as anybody knows — the mighty Olympus Mons, as snapped by the ESA Mars […]
TechDirt is a democracy blog.
Have I cited TechDirt here before? I’m pretty sure I have. Anyway, in a sign of the weird times today, they’ve just come out and […]
100 days with a titanium heart
Nature reports on a new record from the transplant waiting list, with an Australian patient who spent 100 days waiting for a donor organ with […]
Science Art: Opportunities for Design & Development Engineers…, 1966.
This is the illustration from a full-page ad from the Hughes Aircraft Company in the Jan/Feb 1966 issue of Information Display magazine. This isn’t selling […]
The pigbutt worm: a marine mystery.
National Geographic marvels at a recently discovered sea creature named, due to its bizarrely voluptuous curves and clefts, the pigbutt worm: Such was the case […]
AI to translate cat faces.
Nature: Scientific Reports wants you to know why your cat is making faces at you. They’ve published a study that uses artificial intelligence to decipher […]
Science Art: The Great Paris Reflector, 1898.
This is an image from The New Astronomy, a textbook of space sciences I found on archive.org. It’s one of what was at the time […]
A vaccine for pancreatic cancer.
I grew up learning (rightly or wrongly) that pancreatic cancer was “one of the bad ones,” fast-moving and tough to beat. Now, Science Friday is […]
Science Art: Lepiota Echinellus, 1887
You probably shouldn’t eat these. This is an illustration of a Lepiota mushroom from the Bulletin de la Société botanique de France. The genus includes […]