A new road to Mars
Popular Science charts a course to Mars that’s easier and cheaper… in a roundabout way: Spacecraft usually enter orbit around planets via Hohmann transfer, which […]
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 moreDIY warp drive. He’s folding space in his garage.
Omaha World-Herald wants the world to know about this guy who’s building a warp drive in his garage: [David] Pares’ garage is exactly as it […]
No song today.
It’s been a season, this holiday has. Mea maxima culpa. One verse and an arrangement sans guitar does not a song make. It’ll be posted […]
Life-extension wonder-drug: Advil. In multiple species.
Science Daily reveals a bizarre hidden power of one of the world’s most common over-the-counter analgesics: Regular doses of ibuprofen extended the lifespan of multiple […]
Science Art: Astronauts Clown Around In Space
Click to embiggen In 1984, astronauts had to ride out in the Space Shuttle Discovery to retrieve two broken-down satellites, and decided to have a […]
Honeybee stuff makes your hair grow.
Science Daily takes a look at propolis, the sticky putty-like stuff honeybees use to seal up their hives. There are all kinds of health claims […]
The mighty (tiny, but mighty) primate ancestor… waaay bigger than expected.
New Scientist tries to keep some perspective about our great-great-etc. grandfather, Ursolestes, a prehistoric primate who might seem to us, a squirrel monkey. To dinosaurs, […]
Dumb chemicals drop babies’ IQs.
Science Daily reveals that two kinds of phthalates – chemicals found in ordinary stuff like dryer sheets, soap, lipstick and vinyl fabrics – can drop […]
Once in the ocean, where does the plastic *go*?
Nature surveys the plastic in the seas, expects to see things like detergent bottles and Barbies breaking up into tiny “microplastic” particles, and doesn’t. So […]
Sugar (especially the kind in fruit juice) is replacing salt as blood pressure enemy No. 1.
MedPage Today is among the sources spreading the determination (with no mincing of words) that sugar is just as bad as salt – if not […]
Science Art: Fig 114 – July normal sea-level pressure, Southern Hemisphere.
Click to embiggen Making the invisible visible – the air over the South Pole, Australia, Tierra del Fuego, Cape Town and beyond. From General Meteorology […]
Why menthol makes it harder to quit.
New Scientist reveals how menthol – something originally added to cigarettes to soothe smokers’ throats – actually makes cigarettes more ‘cigarette-y’: People who smoke menthol […]
Electric eels are puppet masters
New Scientist pulls back the curtain on how electric eels “remote control” their prey, freezing them right next to their hungry mouths: The experiments that […]
Graffiti older than Neanderthals
Nature looks over some triangles – not unlike capital letter As – etched into a shell on Java and determines they were carved by Homo […]
Considering Orion.
Scientific American takes a moment, after all the hubbub last week, to think over what the success of the Orion launch means for NASA and […]