A new Dead Sea Scroll… and even more ancient things.
NPR reports that archaeologists working in caves on the shores of the Dead Sea have found, for the first time in 60 years, another fragmentary […]
Science
They resuscitated 100 million-year-old bacteria.
Scientific American reports on new evidence that bacteria may be “effectively immortal” after researchers brought back microbes that settled to the ocean floor tens of […]
To take a “D” off ADHD.
Scientific American puts forward an argument for renaming the neurological, psychological, something-ological condition that we currently call ADHD: The classificatory terms we use all refer […]
Science Art: Welcome to ‘Octavia E. Butler Landing’, NASA, 2021.
Click to embiggen NASA named the landing site for the Mars rover mission after science fiction author Octavia E. Butler. As they say on their […]
Mars rover sends “overwhelming” audio home. (And video and pics too.)
Science magazine celebrates an unusual media package – pictures, movies, and most of all sounds sent to Earth from the Mars Perseverance rover: But perhaps […]
New climate change weapon sucks CO2 straight out of the sky.
Scientific American reports on some scientific Canadians who have tackled the carbon-offset problem – there’s too much CO2 trapping heat in the atmosphere – in […]
Science Art: Persea: Taft, by Royal Charles Steadman, 1914.
Click to embiggen It’s an avocado, an aguacate, also known as an alligator pear in English and a “lawyer pear” in Dutch. This is a […]
Psych study: Microdosing really works. But so do placebos.
Science shares a study that found microdoses of psychedelic mushrooms really do work to boost creativity and create feelings of well-being… but so did inert […]
A quickly random bow tie, and why that’s important.
Nature reports on a new milestone in the quest for true randomness – a quality that’s vitally useful in things like data security and models […]
Brain-cell clusters can mimic a newborn’s brain.
Science magazine looks at a mini-brain in a mini-jar – a cluster of stem cells coaxed into forming an “organoid,” a clump of cells that […]
Science Art: Diagram of interferometer and four mirrors mounted on stone floating in mercury…, 1887
Click to embiggen From the Library of Congress, we find a diagram of astrophysics equipment from the 19th century. It’s not a telescope. It’s a […]
Slavs first wrote with runes.
Archaeology magazine looks at a cow bone engraved with runic letters around 600 CE in the southern Czech Republic – a discovery that indicates that […]
America is cloning ferrets.
AP News is reporting that America has caught up with Scotland in the clone wars. They cloned Dolly the Sheep, and now we’ve cloned an […]
Science Art: Leavitt Bulldog body diagram, 2013
As most folks know, today’s English bulldog is an animal that has been, as they say, “overbred.” They have beautiful temperaments as a rule, and […]
Was it beer, or was it bread? Made for the living or made for the dead?
Discover pulls back the curtain on an archaeological debate over some pits in the ground in Israel – holes that show traces of 13,000-year-old fermentation […]