SHARK robot for hunting submarines
Robots.net reviews The Pentagon’s latest unmanned drone program – heading underwater with robots named SHARKs (Submarine Hold At RisK): The robot is designed for Distributed […]
Science
Science Art: Nazca Lines, Peru, 2000, NASA’s Earth as Art
These are probably the world’s largest petroglyphs. They’re ancient rock carvings that we can see from space. You can’t make out the funky checkerboards, or […]
Cthulhu lives! He’s just really small. And kinda cute.
Science, Space & Robots brings the paralysis of inhuman knowledge, as creatures tiny and writhing cast their malevolent gazes up at the electron scanning microscope. […]
Polar paradox: Warmer planet, larger ice cap.
Nature puzzles over an unforeseen consequence of global warming – an expansion of Antarctic sea ice as the climate warms: While sea ice at the […]
Tiki Brazil (Thor Heyerdahl was right! Maybe.)
Nature, in what was almost certainly not an April Fools’ gag, reports that there’s genetic evidence, now, that Polynesians traveled to the Amazon in days […]
Real money. Virtual currency. Hard rules.
New Scientist adds up the arguments over bitcoins, the computer-generated form of money. We’re now seeing plans to regulate the imaginary currency: Virtual currencies are […]
Why is there something? Anything? Instead of nothing?
NPR asks the biggest question of all – the original question. Look around. Why is there something instead of nothing?: The best answer we have […]
Science Art: Plate VI, from Monograph on the Aye-aye, by Richard Owen, 1863
In 1863, naturalist Richard Owen published 72 pages of joy. Is it related to the lemur? Aye. Does it climb through the jungle at night? […]
Psychedelic sponges. Why?
Vice, of all publications, examines the strange chemistry of the first-known psychedelic sponges… trying to figure out why sponges would make something as potent as […]
After everything, the Higgs boson still dooms us all. In a few billion years.
Scientific American crunches the numbers that show how the mass of the Higgs boson spells the end of the universe… eventually: “If you use all […]
The power of diagrams. The beauty of diagrams.
SciAm blogger Clarissa Ai Ling Lee reflects on the science and art of visualizing information: Of course, there were records of politics, observations of particular […]
Lockheed Martin’s quantum computer steps into the limelight.
New York Times has a pretty good profile of what could be the next big breakthrough in computing – the chips that understand “maybe”: [A] […]
Science Art: Plate 2527 Guarda (a mechanism for protecting airships), by Charles A.A. Dellschau, 1912.
Click to embiggen This may be an important historical record of the early days of aeronautics, or it may be a vivid fantasy by a […]
Earthquakes make instant gold.
OK, well, instant veins of gold, at least. The gold, Nature says, is in the ground already. But it takes an earthquake to make it […]
Cars shape sparrows’ evolution.
Nature demonstrates how (possibly) our machines are transforming birds’ whole existence: Roadside-nesting cliff swallows have evolved shorter, more manoeuvrable wings, which may have helped them […]