Our butts used to be sperm dispensers.
Science Alert reports on an evolutionary study that has found our butts (from which everybody, as the children’s book tells us, poops) were originally a […]
Science Art: Collops bipunctatus, U, Back, SD, Pennington County, 2013
This image of a Collops bipunctatus, a beetle from the Melyridae family, was taken by Sam Droege from flowers …
Read moreScience Art: Histologist Microscope, 1900
An illustration of an elegant optical device from Science Gossip magazine (a publication which I discovered via…
Read moreScience Art: Rudimentary Simulator, 1963.
This is Figure 3 from “Man-Machine System Simulation for Flight Vehicles” by Steven Belsley, an article which w…
Read moreScience Art: Astrapia Splendidissima, 1895
This is the first illustration in the article “A New Bird of Paradise” by the Hon. Walter Rothschild, published…
Read moreScience Art: Ever See This Before?, 1966.
This is an actual image of a cathode-ray tube, “the furthest advance yet made in man/ machine interface,” used …
Read moreScience Art: Sunrise - Philippine Sea, 2017
This is an image from the “Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth” gallery, maintained by the Earth Science …
Read more
SONG: Titanium Heart
SONG: “Titanium Heart”. (OGG version here.) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on “Man survives with titanium heart for 100 days — a world first,” Nature, 13 […]
A new color, named “olo.”
BBC reports on an odd optical experiment that resulted in human eyes seeing an entirely new color, a kind of super-saturated aqua they’ve dubbed “olo”: […]
Science Art: Woltmann’s Tachometer, 1882
Oh, hydrology. This is a device to measure the speed of water flow, as described in A practical treatise on hydraulic and water-supply engineering: relating […]
Nearby galaxies are shredding each other.
BBC Science Focus looks up at the heavens and sees two nearby galaxies — the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) — […]
Too much space junk.
The European Space Agency has an unfortunate report about future satellites. They’re much closer to running out of room because, as Science Alert puts it, […]
Science Art: Mathematical Knot Table 01, by Rodrigo Argenton
These are knots. Not knots used to tie down boats or headstrong horses, but knots used to explore geometries of space. The display was made […]
A mysterious trilobite cousin deciphered.
For a long while, paleontologists have been trying to figure out what was up with Helmetia expansa, a prehistoric creature from before the dinosaurs that […]
Intelligence evolved at least twice on Earth.
In science-nerd circles, people lately have been really into talking about how many times crabs evolve — that is, how many unrelated invertebrate families wind […]
Science Art: Portuguese Man-Of-War, Tongued Sarsia, by Philip Henry Gosse
This image comes from Philip Henry Gosse’s A Year at the Shore, specifically, the month of October. (The year isn’t specified, but the book was […]
Science Art: Periophthalmus koelreuteri, 1942.
This is a mudskipper who is being drawn here solely for the qualities of its bulbous, beautiful eyes. The illustration is from page 453 of […]
The smell of Venus de Milo
NPR reports on new findings for classical works of art. It’s pretty well known now that the stark white of ancient Greek marble statues was […]
Krill sniff penguin poop
And, says National Geographic, it makes them take evasive maneuvers, ready to dodge their Antarctic predators: In Antarctica’s Palmer Station lab, scientists put wild-caught krill […]
AI can’t beat Pokémon
Something for your inner 12-year-old to feel superior about, as published in Ars Technica. Anthropic’s Claude AI, pretty helpful at summarizing documents and parsing transcripts, […]
Science Art: Lincoln’s Measurements, compared with “Old Americans,” 1953 (detail).
This is part of a graphic from a 1953 issue of Natural History, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s magazine. The article it’s illustrating is […]