Science Art: Magpie on the Gallows, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1568
Oh, a beautiful Renaissance landscape by one of those Lowland masters, a naturalistic scene of people meeting merrily on a wooded path between the village […]
Science
SciAm considers ways to make magic mushrooms, if not legal, at least less illegal.
Scientific American commentator Mason Marks, a law professor, examines three roads to making psilocybin easier for researchers – and people who need clinical help – […]
Lucy is NASA’s mission to find “fossils” in space.
NASA has launched a probe named Lucy, after the Australopithecus fossil that rewrote the story of human origins. This Lucy’s job is to check out […]
African farmers use bee hives as elephant-proof fences.
Scientific American looks at scientific Kenyans, who have taken advantage of one of the few things elephants are actually afraid of – stinging honeybees – […]
Science Art: Caméleon, Sébastien Le Clerc, 1676
This is a chameleon seen inside and out in Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux, by Claude Perrault, an early text on natural […]
Singapore robots patrol against “anti-social behavior.”
Euronews.com reports on a new use for robots, to enforce social mores and good citizenship. Citizens seem less than pleased with the artificial politeness police, […]
China’s moon mission found something interesting.
Reuters reports that the Chinese moon mission brought back rock samples that were about a billion years younger than expected – meaning the molten early […]
Science Art: The MASTIF, or Multiple Axis Space Test Inertia Facility.
Welcome to Cleveland, spaceman! This was a training device from what was the Lewis Research Center and is now the John H. Glenn Research Center […]
Robot sailboat shoots video inside a major hurricane.
NOAA accomplished a world first when category-4 Hurricane Sam raged across the middle Atlantic, by sending an automated vessel named Saildrone Explorer SD 1045 into […]
Planning for a funeral on Mars.
Discover magazine discusses an unusual problem we haven’t had to face yet. How will Mars colonists handle their first funerals in an environment where human […]
Science Art: Blue Shark (Carcharias glaucus), 1904.
Reinhold Thiele painted this limber-looking blue shark for the book British Salt-Water Fishes. I found it on Wikimedia Commons, but they got it from University […]
Volcanoes let dinosaurs happen – by changing the climate.
Science News looks at a case of climate change from millions of years before humans existed – a series of volcanic eruptions that caused 2 […]
Facebook’s fake, troll-farm Christians.
MIT Review has one for the “strange days” file. An internal 2019 report leaked by a Facebook analyst found that 19 of the 20 most […]
Science Art: Phone Tester for Electric Circuits, Patent No. 1,187,500; issued to G. B. Raymond.
These are not headphones, exactly. This is a thing made of telephone parts designed to help electrical tinkerers do better tinkering. It’s from a page […]
Footprints prove people were walking around America more than 20,000 years ago.
Science presents hard evidence that humans really were in North America at the time of the last Ice Age, along with giant sloths and glyptodonts: […]