The Larkin Effect exposed: How parents pass anxiety on to their kids.
Science Daily peers deep into our brains to reveal how exactly our parents messed us all up: The study is being published this week in […]
Science
Sorry, arachnophobes. Spiders can go *everywhere*.
Nature reveals how spiders can use webbing to sail through the air… and then land on water and keep on sailing: Morito Hayashi, a spider […]
Science Art: Scheutz mechanical calculator (Zeichnung der Difference Engine No.1 aus dem Jahr 1853), 1867.
Click to embiggen Now, after that brief, regrettable interruption in service, a tribute to the computer. This illustration is from The Elements of Natural Philosophy; […]
Science Art: Fig. XLIII. Hydromylos, sive aquaria mola, 1662.
This is a waterwheel, from a book written by architect and engineer Georg Andreas Boeckler, under the title Theatrum machinarum novum : exhibens opera molaria […]
Land planarians are invading the U.S.!
PeerJ has a study revealing how one the planet’s most invasive species has wormed its way into – of course – Florida: The land planarian […]
Memories are physical: they last as long as the nerve-cell connections that store them.
So say Stanford University neurologists, who have actually seen memories under a microscope – and watched them vanish: Now Mark Schnitzer, an associate professor of […]
Laser “tricorder” diagnoses malaria through the skin.
I couldn’t really improve on New Scientist‘s headline there. This device shines a laser through an earlobe or wrist and detects malaria parasites through light […]
The sports car that reads your mind.
Auto Guide (and a few other places) have been looking at… well, is the step before a driverless car or the step beyond? Anyway, it’s […]
Science Art: Paper Wings, by Nicole Frost.
Click to embiggen These are paper sculptures of birds’ wings – four specific categories of birds’ wings. As explained by their creator: This is my […]
We don’t have to protect the Eastern Cougar any more. There aren’t any left.
The Guardian has more on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s official extinction verdict: The agency said on Tuesday the four-year review, which included information […]
Zombies of the ancient world
Popular Archaeology thrills us with really, really old scares… digging up (literally!) evidence of Classical Greek zombie stories: As one case in point, [University of […]
The Vulnerable Ape theory of human origins.
PhysOrg turns the “brutal caveman” stereotype on its head, with a new look at our earliest ancestors as sensitive folks who got a leg up […]
Good morning, Philae. How’s that comet looking 200 days later?
The ESA has spent an eventful weekend now that the Rosetta probe has woken up after a long sleep on a comet: Hidden by shadows, […]
Science Art: Beetle, magnified 26 diameters, 1871.
Click to embiggen This seems to be a minute beetle, as pictured in Objects for the microscope, being a popular description of the most instructive […]
A lab-grown limb (muscle, blood and skin).
New Scientist has photos and video of a severed rat limb… that was never part of any rat’s body. It was grown in a dish: […]