Worms. Inside you. Making you better.
That’s the big idea behind this New York Times piece about the doctor who gave himself hookworms to see if they’d cure his allergies: He […]
Science
Music’s in the genes.
Scientific American presents a scathing indictment of my forebears as it reveals a link between genetics and musicality: In what the researchers called the first […]
Science Art: Saturn’s Aurora
Click to embiggen An ultraviolet image of Saturn taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the vast, violent, invisible auroras around the huge planet’s poles. […]
Fireworks.
Or the next best thing: New Scientist’s gallery of supernova remnants. Here’s the most recent photo: Click to embiggen; photo credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team This […]
Mushrooms and meaning.
Johns Hopkins researchers are getting profoundly trippy, PhysOrg reports, in a research project that found psychedelic mushrooms can have long-lasting spiritual effects: “Most of the […]
Whistles of death and healing.
Wired takes a musical trip to ancient Mexico, with the help of an engineer who has recreated the sounds of the Aztecs and Mayans and […]
Too clean for comfort (or “We’re composed of membranes too.”).
Nature recently published a story that should shock the clean freaks among us. Researchers have found that common disinfectants lower fertility and cause birth defects […]
Four-legged Fish.
It walks! It has gills, but by goodness it WALKS! The BBC isn’t quite so enthusiastic in describing the discovery of a four-legged fish fossil: […]
Science Art: Coelastrum by Andrews
Simon Andrews took this microscopic photograph of a cell cluster of coelastrum algae and submitted it to Wikimedia Commons, where I found it.
Brief: Phoenix on Twitter
How much am I loving the Mars Phoenix tweets? Very much.
Meditation, Mindfulness and “Untraining” the Brain.
ScienceBlogs has (have?) a piece on an interesting study about ways to make your thinking less hidebound and more creative: Yet relatively few studies focus […]
Spray-on skin.
PopSci‘s got skin in a can. I mean it. An aerosol. You spray it on burns. It’s skin in a can: Within the next five […]
Neanderthals About Town.
PhysOrg.com puts on the Ritz with a new discovery about the sophisticated Neanderthals of Great Britain: “The tools we’ve found at the site are technologically […]
Science Art: “Dirigible Balloon” The New Students Reference Work
From The New Students Reference Work (1914), edited by Chandler B. Beach, associate editor Frank Morton McMurry. Scanned by Wikimedia Commons user LA2.
Scared eyes see more.
Eyes as round as quarters, mouth pulled into a hideous grimace, New Scientist pulls back the veil on a chilling new study that reveals the […]