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 […]
Science
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 […]
Dancing is better than repetitive exercise for keeping elderly brains fit.
PLOS ONE has an interesting look at brain plasticity – that is, your ability to learn new things, change the way you do things, and […]
Scientists have woken up 100-million-year-old microbes.
BBC is not intimidating us all with news that researchers with the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology have treated a colony of dormant […]
A brittle star’s whole body is an eye.
Scientific American looks at how these starfish relatives don’t need eyes to see: And yet now there appears to be something far stranger about the […]
Hygiene theater: All the hand sanitizer in the world is kinda beside the point.
The Atlantic looks at the problem with the way public responses to the pandemic have evolved into rituals that look “disinfecting” but really aren’t nearly […]
Science Art: A section through the cochlea in the line of its axis, 1910.
Click to embiggen An inner ear, dear, from The human body; an account of its structure and activities and the conditions of its healthy working, […]
Betelgeuse, the cannibal.
“Bad Astronomer” Phil Plait, over at SyFy.com, explains a new study that demonstrates how the red giant Betelgeuse might have gotten so big – by […]
New COVID hypothesis: not bat meat, but bat mines.
Guano mining is a real thing, and a really fascinating thing. And sometimes a really dangerous thing, too. The Bioscience Resource Project revisits the case […]
Science Art: Mechanische Maschinen und Automaten 49, from Bellicorum instrumentorum liber cum …, 1420-1430
This is something I first assumed was a very early typewriter or printing press, from the Bavarian State Library’s copy of Bellicorum instrumentorum liber cum […]
Help track satellites (for astronomers worried that they’re starting to block out the stars.)
Satellite Streak Watcher is a project on the AnecData citizen science site that asks anyone with a cell phone to take a picture of the […]