It’s a little reading robot for the whole wide internet.
New Scientist looks at the AI that’s been assigned the unenviable task of reading every scientific paper online and finding the important ones: Semantic Scholar, […]
Science
DIY Internet: How Orca Island, WA, became their own provider.
Ars Technica has an inspirational story of some folks who decided they could do a better job than their “professional” ISP: Around that time, CenturyLink […]
Super-healthy tomatoes showcase genetic meddling’s sunny side.
Scientific American celebrates a bumper crop of super-healthy tomatoes, thanks to genetic modification: A single tomato of the new variety contains the same amount of […]
Everything you know about low-fat dieting is wrong.
Nature reveals that low-fat diets don’t really help you lose weight: An analysis of 53 weight-loss studies that included more than 68,000 people has concluded […]
Science Art: Idolo de ignota localidad, Idolo de Arica, Idolo de ignota localidad.
Click to embiggen. Three idols, from the Anales del Museo Nacional de Chile, published between 1892 and 1910. I found them in the Biodiversity Heritage […]
Weird stuff: Better for your brain and your waistline.
Scientific American reveals that the stuff you really weren’t expecting – the “unusual, the jarring, the culturally shocking” – can improve your cognitive ability and […]
Step aside HIV. Tuberculosis is now the deadliest infectious disease.
New Scientist reveals that, worldwide, more people died from TB than from AIDS: This year marks the deadline for the Millennium Development Goal of cutting […]
Depression could be an immune problem.
Medical XPress examines a link between major depression and immune-system cells in the brain called “microglia”: In a groundbreaking theoretical review paper published in the […]
Science Art: A Querschnitt durch die Wurzelspitze…, 1905.
Click to embiggen The translation of “a Querschnitt durch die Wurzelspitze von Equisetum hiemale dicht unterhalb der Scheitelzelle nach Naegeli und Leitgeb,” according to Google, […]
The meanest, most-quickly-intensifying hurricane in the Western Hemisphere.
Dr. Jeff Masters at Weather Underground has a lot of superlatives for Hurricane Patricia, the Category 5 storm that leapt up out of nowhere to […]
There’s a new giant tortoise species in the Galapagos.
Science Daily reports that where scientists had thought there was only one kind of giant tortoise, there were actually two.
Cuba & U.S. team up to save sharks.
Nature points out one pleasant side effect of the growing diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba – we’re doing better than ever at protecting […]
Apatosaurus could have cracked its tail like a giant whip.
Scientific American explores a strange anatomical detail for a very large dinosaur indeed – a whip-like tail that could actually have cracked like a whip: […]
Science Art: Gate of Lodore, from the Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories.
Behold the West. This is the frontispiece to a scientific report, the Report on the geology of the eastern portion of the Uinta Mountains and […]
Maybe… just maybe… we’re getting as much sleep as we always did.
It sure doesn’t feel like it, but Scientific American has some research to suggest that all these screens and electric lights really aren’t ruining our […]