Ritual intoxication in the Holy Land
Times of Israel reports on archaelogists puzzling out just *how* high Philistines were getting for religious reasons: In an upcoming symposium in Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, […]
Science 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 moreScience Art: Égouts de Paris, by Jules Ferat.
There’s a subtitle here that Google Translate renders as “Sewer cleaning wagon. (System of Chief Engineer Mr. B…
Read moreScience Art: Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, by David K. Stone.
I found the image in the San Diego Air & Space Museum’s “Aerophilately Special Collection” on Flickr; this is a…
Read moreSONG: Alone
SONG: “Alone”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “What Killed the Neanderthals? A Lack …
Read moreItalian police pressure scientists investigating olive blight.
Nature uncovers just how hard it can be to do research when your subjects keep dying: In the past year, plant scientists at various institutes […]
No more moldy bats!
White-nose syndrome is the fungal disease (you might recall) that’s killing bats. Millions of them. But now, National Geographic is giving us hope that a […]
Science Art: LightSail by Josh Spradling / The Planetary Society
Click to embiggen This is the thing the last song was about, LightSail, which even now is orbiting Earth and probably (if it’s going as […]
Sleep away your bad attitudes.
Science Daily covers a Northwestern University study that shows how to remove biases from your brain while you’re sleeping: Other researchers have documented many unsavory […]
That Deepwater Horizon spill… it’s still killing dolphins.
Nature has the grisly details about the 1,300 dolphin deaths that can be traced to that one incident: The spike in dolphin deaths began shortly […]
Wood chips (of the computer variety).
Science Daily peers into the smoke clouds to see the truth behind biodegradable computer chips make from wood: Portable electronics — typically made of non-renewable, […]
Fire exposes something really interesting on Montana’s plains – an unseen stone complex.
WesternDigs.org reveals what we now know about the ceremonial carvings hidden for centuries under the sod: Among the formations are two large effigies — or […]
Plate LXXVII: The First Picture of an American Butterfly from The Butterfly Book by W.J. Holland, 1930 edition.
Click to embiggen In 1930, this picture… or rather, the picture with the inscriptions beside it… had never before been published. And the inscriptions are […]
SONG: I Am Sailing
SONG: “I Am Sailing.” ARTIST: grant. SOURCE:Based on “LightSail”, sail.planetary.org, retrieved 13 May 2015, as used in the post “A solar sail unfurling. Not sometime […]
Young blood heals old bones. (Literally. Go figure.)
Smithsonian reveals a new way to heal the easily-broken bones of the elderly – by exposing the fractures to younger blood: “The traditional concept is […]
Snakes had ankles a long, long time ago.
Science Daily paints a picture of the very first snakes… before they lost their feet: The study, led by Yale University, USA, analyzed fossils, genes, […]
Engineered yeast grows opiates at home.
Nature opens the door to home-brewed heroin – just add water and sugar: A paper published on 18 May in Nature Chemical Biology reports the […]
The moonfish is warm-blooded.
Science Daily throws our sense of things slightly out of whack with news that there’s a fish out there that’s entirely warm-blooded: New research by […]
Science Art: Os Maxillaires Fossiles, by Pieter Camper.
Click to embiggen Jaws! Pieter Camper was a fossil collector, and in 1786, he drew this jaw he’d acquired. He thought it belonged to a […]