China 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 […]
Science Art: Jupiter's Family of Comets, 1898
This is a diagram from A New Astronomy For Beginners, a textbook that’s about a century and a quarter old, or a…
Read moreSONG: Your Catalogue
SONG: “Your Catalogue”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: NBC News, “New wild cat species is ide…
Read moreScience Art: Beebe's Bathysphäre, 1934
This is an image of William Beebe’s bathysphere, as placed on Wikimedia Commons by ETH Bibliothek. It was creat…
Read moreScience Art: Power of RCA Electron Microscope, May 1955
These are diatoms, I think, seen by two different microscopes.
As the caption from Popular Electronics says…
Read moreScience Art: Red Pepper, 1910.
Red pepper (Cayenne pepper) will cure almost any case of la grippe within 24 hours, or so they say. At least no…
Read moreScience Art: Figs. 1315-1333 (Various rotary piston engines), 1890.
This is a page of figures from (deep breath) The engineer’s sketch-book of mechanical movements, devices, appli…
Read moreMore 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 […]
Coffee (and pepper) of the dinosaurs discovered.
Discovery News hypes the headline a little here (but forgivably) by declaring that a 45-million-year-old prehistoric coffee has been discovered preserved in amber: Named Strychnos […]