Air miner.
Lando. Lando Calrissian. Cloud miner. Sounds like a great space opera profession, doesn’t it? But National Geographic is talking about exploiting the atmosphere for fuel: […]
Science
Garage biology. (Like garage rock.)
The Daily is reporting on a revolution. DIY researchers are leaving the academy to take a punk rock approach to science: Three years ago, [Mackensie] […]
Science Art: Wattles of Cock Tragopans, by William Beebe, from A Monograph on Pheasants, 1918-1922.
The artist and writer William Beebe is better known for his deep sea explorations than his wattle portraiture. He studied at Columbia, but spent too […]
The 147 corporations that run everything.
New Scientist looks at where and how business happens – and reveals that out of 37 million global companies, it’s only a very few who […]
A Viking burial.
From around 900 CE, in a boat on Scotland’s west coast, comes a dead Viking warrior. BBC reports on the most complete Norse grave site […]
Spies turn to Twitomancy
That’s the use of Twitter for divination purposes. And, Nature says, is now an official field of government intelligence research: The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects […]
Polio spreads.
BBC says the disease, once thought practically eradicated, is now moving out into China from Pakistan: Polio has been found in China for the first […]
Herring AND good genes can keep you young.
So reports LiveScience’s “Bad Medicine” columnist Christopher Wanjek, writing about the woman who was the world’s oldest: The 115-year-old Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper, who held the […]
Science Art: “Good News for Bad Writers” (The Typewriter, Punch, September1867)
Click to embiggen In 1867, the typewriter was a ridiculous leap in technology. The editor of Punch anticipated the next step: “Writing Superseded. — Mr. […]
T-rex hungrier, bigger than thought.
So time travelers, don’t say we didn’t warn you. Reuters reports that the king of carnivores was even fiercer than we imagined: Using three-dimensional laser […]
It makes, uhhh, more sense. When I, ummm…
And, according to Scientific American, when I “errr” and “hmmm” too. Those weird verbal tics help children learn: Such vocal hesitations, called disfluencies, tend to […]
Touching robot fingers.
You wouldn’t think it would be emotional, but as this CBS report illustrates, that depends on if it’s the first time you’ve held hands with […]
Lair of the kraken.
PhysOrg uncovers tantalizing traces of terrifying prehistoric predator – a giant squid that hunted ichthyosaurs: But the fossils at the [Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada] […]
Science Art: Caisson, by Pearson Scott Foreman.
Found on Wikimedia Commons. It moves water. It moves me.
Liver brains.
MedicalXpress reveals a new source for nerve cells without stem cells – making neurons from liver cells: Fully mature liver cells from laboratory mice have […]