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, […]
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 moreEngineered 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 […]
We can watch your mind changing. This is what a decision looks like.
Science Daily goes deep, deep into our innermost selves and reveals what a brain looks like the moment a mind changes: The findings result from […]
A solar sail unfurling. Not sometime in the unspecified future – *next week*.
Bill Nye, more than just an enthusiast on the TV, has gotten a group together – part of The Planetary Society – to test a […]
Mobile phone microscope saving lives (and eyes) in Africa
Nature has more on a cell phone gizmo that’s changing how medicine is done in remote places: In a study in Science Translational Medicine on […]
Science Art: From Die Frau als Hausärztin by Anna Fischer-Dückelmann, 1911
This is a naked woman, as seen in 1911 by a German medical expert. The book’s title translates to “The Woman As Family Doctor,” and […]
Poverty shrinks kids’ brains.
Nature measures the price of poverty, and the effect it has on children. A bi-coastal study has found that poverty shrinks kids’ brains from birth: […]
An 800-year-old Viking note found. Written in runes on a slip of wood.
Science Nordic hails a medieval discovery in the heart of Odense, Denmark – a medieval runestick written by someone named Tomme: It isn’t easy to […]
Using tDCS – mild electric jolts to stimulate your brain – actually hurts your IQ score.
Science Daily reports on University of North Carolina research that shows transcranial stimulation, the fascinating new tech that uses mild DC current to “switch on” […]
Short, simple abstracts… aren’t cited as much as those with abstracts tending to maximize the high-verbosity quotient.
Laboratory Equipment has sad news for those of us who like straight, simple, elegant communication. It appears that scientific articles with abstracts packed with (unnecessary […]
In the Martian morning, there’s dew… (and it’s eating away our rover’s wheels)
Science writer Leonard David is concerned. It seems like Mars Rover Curiosity is having some unusual wear on it wheels… erosion and corrosion that seems […]
Science Art: Lecture 2, Figure 5, from Lectures on Ventilation,
Click to embiggen from Lectures on Ventilation (1869) by Lewis W. Leeds, via Public Domain Review. The invisible made visible.
Pocahontas was married here. In this church.
Well, sort of. Popular Archaeology traces the efforts now underway to rebuild the Jamestown church where Pocahontas was married: About five years after the footprint […]