MAVEN’s at Mars.
The skies over the Red Planet, as The New York Times and others are reporting, are getting downright crowded with satellites from Earth. The latest […]
Science Art: Body-centered cubic (bcc) unit cell of iron, 2009
If you were curious about the crystalline structure of iron mentioned in the last post, here it is — a molecul…
Read moreScience Art: MOON: For the Benefit of Humanity, 2023
It’s a poster made by NASA for lunar exploration, showing some landers, space stations, and sample-taking equip…
Read moreScience Art: Bubble chamber with colour enhanced tracks, 2026
This is a CERN image from January 6, 2026, showing something that happened in the 1960s, but enhanced for 21st-…
Read moreScience Art: Dissection of Asterias rubens, by Hans Hillewaert.
Starfish anatomy.
If you want to know the parts, according to Dutch Wikipedia, they are:
Read moreLegend
1 Arm
2…
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: Sarcoptes scabiei, from Brockhaus’ Konversations-Lexikon, 1892.
Click to embiggen They itch. They dig in and they itch. These are the mites that cause scabies, the tiny tunnelers, burrowing into the skin […]
India’s Mars probe ready to orbit
Nature reports on India’s preparations for their first interplanetary exploration: Mangalyaan, known formally as the Mars Orbiter Mission, or MOM, was launched by the Indian […]
Thanks for the rides, former Soviets – Boeing and SpaceX are taking it from here.
NASA has formally announced that two private companies will be taking our astronauts to the International Space Station: The CST-100 and Dragon version 2 have […]
Schizophrenia: many diseases in one
Daily Beast looks over Washington University research that’s found that the singular diagnosis of schizophrenia is actually a compound disease, caused by eight different genetic […]
Robot cheetah runs free!
Science Daily blows the whistle on the MIT robotics engineers who let the robot cheetah off its tether to run and jump like a wild […]
Science Art: Figure 3, Transverse Section of a Single Cell by F. Bauer, Esq., F.R.S., 1827.
Click to embiggen Take a deep breath. This is the inside of your lung, seen really closely. At the time his was drawn, we weren’t […]
Bendy ceramics.
Science Daily explores the weird, microscopic world of making ceramics that can bend and twist and smush and reform: Caltech materials scientist Julia Greer and […]
Printing solar cells.
Outside has a hopeful, intriguing report on an Australian company that’s figured out how to print electricity-generating solar cells on plastic… or whatever: The Victorian […]
Worried? Trouble sleeping? Congrats, you might have a higher risk of Alzheimer’s.
BBC reports the in no way worrisome news that researchers have discovered a correlation benzodiazepines (pills for anxiety and sleep) and a hugely increased risk […]
Blue whales have recovered, just about.
It’s taken quite a while, but AP can finally report that blue whales off the coast of California have finally reached pre-whaling-industry levels: Researchers previously […]
Kid finds 3,000-year-old sword… while washing his hands.
It helps, as the BBC points out, if you’re washing your hands in a river running through one of the world’s oldest civilizations. But for […]
Science Art: Echinodermata, Plate V detail, by James A. Grieg, 1921
This is the heart (and brain and pretty much anything that’s not an arm) of a brittle star, as sketched for Echinodermata, a study of […]
What do you call a dinosaur that isn’t afraid of anything? Dreadnoughtus.
Popular Mechanics celebrates a new *double* record-breaker, a dinosaur bigger than anything that walked the Earth: Today an international team of paleontologists unveiled the newest […]
Brain-to-brain communication via EEG over the internet.
Science Daily breaks the news that telepathy – brain communication through machines – is not only possible, but scientists have already done it across 5,000 […]