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 […]
Science
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: […]
We might have just detected dark matter.
Science Daily goes deep beneath an Italian mountain range, where the XENON1T experiment got some strange results … that might give us humans our first […]
Science Art: Triops longicaudatus, by Steve Jurvetson, 2005
This is a triops, a three-eyed critter something like a trilobite (though it’s not actually one of those at all). From the Wikimedia Commons description: […]
Robots are waiting tables in Texas.
CNN Business reveals that robots, having basically taken over manufacturing jobs, are now moving into service industry positions, replacing wait staff at a Latin restaurant […]
Strange, ancient Scottish balls.
LiveScience (via ScienceAlert) is puzzling over two polished stone spheres found in a Neolithic site on the isle of Sanday in the Orkneys. The stones […]