America pushes pot to researchers. (And it’s a good thing.)
Nature examines the recent increase the availability of pot to American researchers: [D]espite the increasing availability of legal marijuana, scientists have been forced to obtain […]
Science Art: Mirounga leonina 01, by H. Zell
This is a southern elephant seal, the largest marine mammal that isn’t a whale. They’re about twice as weighty …
Read moreScience Art: What can make any tape recorder sound a little more like an Ampex?, 1963.
This is an ad for Ampex tape from the August 1963 edition of Electronics Australia, a magazine (which I found o…
Read moreScience Art: Cygnus region in emission lines, 2025
This is a photo of space with a bit of color amplification so we can tell what we’re looking at. Nebulas on the…
Read moreScience Art: Heart apical two-chamber view myocardial regions, by Patrick Lynch
This is an illustration of a particular perspective in a cardiac echocardiogram. An “apical view” is one of the…
Read moreSONG: Sleeping Cathedrals
SONG: “Sleeping Cathedrals”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “World’s biggest whale g…
Read moreScience Art: Build Your Own Lie Detector, 1955
This is the opener for an article in the May 1955 issue of Popular Electronics. You can read the article here, …
Read moreScience Art: Patterns of taxonomic and morphological diversification in early ray-finned fishes, M. Friedman.
Fish, in families. Fish, in schools. These are all ray-finned fishes, on a chart showing how they became more diverse from the Devonian period (when […]
This shark is older than the United States.
It was 1744, Nature reports, when this sleepy, small-headed Somniosus microcephalus … when this long-swimming, short-sighted Greenland shark came into the world – if not […]
Data analysts figure out Trump tweets: politics, technology, “angry” words and hashtags.
I try to avoid politics, but the science behind this is really kind of fascinating. Over at Variance Explained, David Robinson used a bunch of […]
The world’s most embarrassingly shaped airship is debuting in England.
Reuters tells the story behind the one-time spy airship entering civilian service as “the flying bum”: The Airlander 10, known in Britain as ‘the flying […]
Scientists track elusive badger-cow encounters.
Nature goes out to the country to track the spread of TB (an unpleasant and expensive disease) by looking at how badgers meet cows… or […]
Science Art: Vertical Image of Area A at Happisburgh, from “Hominin Footprints from Early Pleistocene Deposits at Happisburgh, UK,” 2014.
These are the feet of prehistoric humans – little feet of children, big feet of adults. Actually, it’s an infographic based on a photograph based […]
Highly educated audiences prefer trash films.
PhysOrg is offering a tub of hot, buttered aesthetic vindication with its survey revealing that high education correlates with a love for awful movies: However, […]
There’s a tunnel-bus driving the streets of China.
The Verge has some photos of – and the story behind – the new, tunnel-like city bus that cars can drive under in traffic: According […]
Drinking the ocean.
Scientific American (and notable author Rowan Jacobsen) reports on the dry, dry nation of Israel creating a water surplus by making the sea drinkable: Desal […]
Science Art: Forecasts for 1907, Punch Magazine, 1906.
Click to embiggen This is a cartoon – a *funny* cartoon from about a hundred years before smartphones became a thing. We knew what they […]
A superbug antibiotic… that comes out of our noses?
Nature fearlessly plunges into our nostrils in search of bacteria that can kill MRSA: The potential new soldier in the fight against MRSA is a […]
Leatherbacks get around. Now, they’ve found a new beach.
Miami Herald reports on some hope for an endangered species – the first known leatherback nest (with hatchlings!) found in the Florida Keys: The nest […]
Beer geneticists.
Nature reports on another genetic revolution that’s, um, brewing in Belgium, where DNA researchers are tweaking yeast to make better beer: Kevin Verstrepen’s lab meetings […]
Two teams of scientists are using CRISPR on humans.
CBC News reports on the pioneering work (and maybe friendly rivalry) being used to cure lung cancer with edited genes: [F]or scientists like Jason Moffat, […]