NPR introduces us to a 42-foot-long stranger, the Rice’s whale. The mysterious species is large in size, but small in number, hanging out in off the Redneck Riviera and not bothering… Read the rest “There’s a new whale in the Gulf of Mexico. A whole new species, in fact.”
Listen!
This was how people catalogued birdsongs in the 1930s, with a giant acoustic dish. And then they transferred them to phonograph discs, so everyone could listen.… Read the rest “Science Art: Hunting with a Sound Camera, by William Vogt, 1933.”
Scientific American has looked at the fossil record and found it wanting. Instead of there being a regular pattern of mass extinctions (like the death of the dinosaurs) followed by the rise… Read the rest “Maybe mass extinctions *don’t* lead to a great flowering of new life forms.”
Reuters reveals a new technique to strengthen ordinary concrete by imitating the criss-cross pattern of lobster shells:
… Read the rest “Lobster-shell patterns make concrete stronger.”Reinforced with steel fibres, the concrete becomes more durable
This is not an alien forest. It is also not a picture of the COVID19 virus. It’s an illustration from 2016 of another coronavirus, and specifically of the spike proteins… Read the rest “Science Art: Coronavirus spike protein structure, by David Veesler, University of Washington,2016”
The BBC reports on a new use for space hardware: training computers to count elephant populations from 370 miles overhead to keep them from hurtling into extinction:
… Read the rest “Counting elephants from space: satellite conservation.”The breakthrough could
Science Friday remembers the mysteriously vanished pelagornithids – birds that, we now know, once ruled the skies with toothy beaks and a wingspan twice the size of the modern albatross… Read the rest “The toothy mega-albatross”
On May 25, 2010 at 17 :35 UTC, this was the weather off the North Pacific island called Isla Socorro: Partly cloudy with scattered spirals.
The interesting thing about truly… Read the rest “Science Art: Cloud Vortices off Isla Socorro (Detail) by NASA Goddard Photo and Video”
The Guardian (among other sources) reports on cave paintings on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi that push back the earliest known art made by Homo sapiens to a date about 15,000 years before… Read the rest “Our oldest art is a picture of a pig.”
Discover surveys the state of the research into deep-brain stimulation (DBS), using electrical implants to treat conditions from Parkinson’s to chronic pain, OCD, depression… Read the rest “A pacemaker for your brain.”
Handsome field crickets.
That’s not a name for them, just me admiring them. Gryllus is a genus of field crickets. Once, they were all put in the same species, but then people started… Read the rest “Science Art: Gryllus: Gryllus formosus, Gryllus hirtipes, Gryllus trifasciatus.”
Scientific American‘s 60-Second Science recently covered the neurology of parenthood, revealing how sleep deprivation for caregivers extends to insects as well:
… Read the rest “Baby bees keep their moms up all night, too.”Researchers
LiveScience brings together sordid incestuous subtext, capital punishment, judicial critique, scripture, Oscar Wilde, and of course archaeology in a single story of an excavation … Read the rest “Salome’s dance floor – where John the Baptist was condemned to death – has been uncovered. We think.”
Where the meteors come from in August and November, as pictured in A new astronomy for beginners, 1898, as found on archive.org.
Something about this diagram reminds me… Read the rest “Science Art: Perihelion Parts of Orbits of the August and November Meteor-showers”
The Scientist has some satisfying news to ring in the New Year. The same genetic mechanism that boosts immunity to one lethal pandemic – the hemorrhagic fever known as Ebola –… Read the rest “The same genes that protect against Ebola also protect against COVID-19.”
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