A remarkable woman, 2,500 years ago.
The Times of Israel reports on an unusual discovery – a small seal (as in wax-and-envelope, not as in hunted-in-Arctic) that belonged to a powerful […]
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 moreChina goes green.
Amid news of massive layoffs and financial uncertainty, New Scientist sheds a ray of hope on the Middle Kingdom, reporting on China’s new five-year plan […]
More orangutans than we thought.
BBC has hope for the wild men of the woods. A new population study has found more than double the number of Sumatran orangutans as […]
Science Art: LEAF Sound Horn, by ESA – A. Le Floc’h
Click to embiggen This is a big horn for making big noise. It’s the way the European Space Agency tests how satellites stand up to […]
At Marlon Brando’s island, the war on mosquitos is being won.
Stat goes to the front-line laboratories in French Polynesia, where scientists are beating back mosquitos in revolutionary ways: Hervé Bossin and his team have released […]
Why are American kids getting so good at higher math?
The Atlantic investigates the social movement behind America’s recent surprise win at the international Math Olympiad: You wouldn’t see it in most classrooms, you wouldn’t […]
Fossilized nerves.
Washington Post reports on an impossible-seeming thing – a fossil that’s not just of hard tissue like teeth and bones (and shells), but that reveals […]
So we’ve made sperm. No man necessary.
Nature cuts my last potential for productivity to the quick with news that researchers have made mouse sperm in a dish: Researchers in China say […]
Science Art: Contour plot of Rastrigin’s function in two variables, by Tos
Click to embiggen I don’t have the math language to explain what’s going on here very well. It’s a diagram of the Rastrigin function, which […]
Celebrating happy accidents with The Golden Mole
NPR’s Skunk Bear turns us on (in general, but specifically with this) observing the outsized influence of unanticipated consequences – singling out for awards all […]
SONG: Janssen
SONG: “Janssen.” ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on “Scientists just analyzed the atmosphere of a ‘super-Earth’ for the first time,” Washington Post, 16 Feb. 2016, as […]
Modern Milgram Experiments: plumbing the horror of only following orders
Nature reveals a new generation of Milgram experiments – the 50-year-old psychological tests that had subjects electrocute (or believe they were electrocuting) other people on […]
Science Art: Figure 4, Neopteroplax conemaughensis, 1963
Click to embiggen Such a winning smile…. Neopteroplax was, at one point, something like a crocodile of salamanders – an amphibian about 3 meters long […]
Modern humans and Neanderthals go back further together than we thought.
Science Daily talks about our ancient brothers, the Neanderthals who were us, 100,000 years ago: Today in Nature the team publishes evidence of interbreeding that […]
Alien atmospheres
Washington Post unveils our first observations of the atmosphere on an Earth-like planet outside the solar system: For the first time ever, scientists are sniffing […]