Science
We just had the closest asteroid fly-by ever.
Space.com shares what we learned about how Earth’s gravity has affected 2020QG, a car-sized asteroid that became the closest to approach Earth without slamming into […]
Supernovas have caused mass extinctions. (As if asteroids weren’t bad enough.)
Science Daily reports on radioactivity research that has found evidence that at least one mass extinction event in Earth’s history was caused not by an […]
The one molecule that turns grasshoppers into locusts.
Science News reveals the one chemical that transforms harmless, solitary insects into a crop-destroying, famine-triggering locust swarm: Now, scientists have pinpointed a compound emitted by […]
Science Art: Booby Gannet, by John James Audubon
Click to embiggen A quizzical and curious sea bird, from Birds of America, presented by The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.
Ceres shines brightest where there’s salt water under the surface.
Science Daily looks to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where the dwarf planet Ceres spins – and may serve as a vast reservoir […]
Spinning yarn from human skin
PhysOrg reminds me here of a piece of jewelry my mother won at an auction, which she then gave to me to give to the […]
Google, Facebook should be scared. Targeted ads shown to be less profitable than the old way.
Wired has a story that seems slightly obscure at first, but really strikes at the cornerstone of today’s internet. The main Dutch public broadcaster, Nederlandse […]
Science Art: The many faces of the Sun from Solar Orbiter’s EUI and PHI instruments, 2020
Click to embiggen It’s my mother’s birthday today. Here, nine glorious suns for a Leo. They were photographed by the European Space Agency’s Extreme Ultraviolet […]
We’re going to save the mussels of Appalachia. Yes, we are.
Science News has something (perhaps small, perhaps strange) to be optimistic about. The endangered river mussels of America’s eastern mountains might go back to cleaning […]
We’re still looking at the effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Science magazines has some striking visualizations of the atomic bombing’s long-lasting repercussions in their latest issue – and have had their graphics managing editor, Alberto […]
We’ve got a new way to predict solar flares.
Science Daily shares research from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, that gives us a new handle on predicting when the worst solar flares will […]
Sperm do lopsided barrel-rolls. They don’t have propeller tails.
Science News dashes the popular image of sperm as swimming furiously by spinning their tails like boat propellers. Instead, the little guys only move their […]
Science Art: Phases of the Moon, 1844.
Click to embiggen The moon is a body in space that reflects the light of our sun back at us. Which might sound a little […]
Neanderthals were more sensitive to pain.
Nature produces one more clue that if any prehistoric “cave men” were the tough, insensitive brutes, it was our ancestors. Neanderthals, a new gene study […]