Gut bacteria choose what you eat.
Science Daily takes us humans out of the driver’s seat and puts the germs inside us in charge of the menu tonight: In an article […]
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 moreHIV therapy might work on MS, too.
Neomatica explains how British and Australian researchers are figuring out why HIV patients show an unusual resistance to multiple sclerosis and its symptoms. It may […]
Science Art: Excerpt from The Arabic Machine Manuscript.
Click to embiggen This mysterious water-driven machine is from a mysterious Arabic manuscript, somewhere between 200 and 500 years old. The whole document is full […]
Mummies: WAAAY older than we thought.
Jesus lived 2,000 years ago. There was no such thing as the English language, and most human beings had never even seen paper. 2,500 years […]
Anesthesia works by stealing electrons from your brain.
Scientific American has more on the weird quantum effects that make consciousness go bye-bye: General anaesthetics may extinguish consciousness through mysterious quantum biological effects that […]
Hemp really IS a super-material… in circuitry, that is.
Laboratory Equipment reveals recent findings (as cannabis becomes easier to research) that the marijuana plant might make better supercapacitors than the “wonder material” graphene: David […]
Antiperspirant makes you stinkier. In the long run.
Ain’t that modern life all over? Real Clear Science exposes the (potentially) stinky way antiperspirants alter your armpit bacteria: While most of us might only […]
Fine wines – a plummy finish, a hint of earthiness, and some sex-bending pseudohormones.
Science 2.0 has more on the discovery of lots of phthalates in fine European wines: It isn’t just the booze itself, a group of scholars […]
Science Art: The Common Angler (Lophius piscatorus) (After W. Von Wright in Smitt), 1905.
Click to embiggen This is from the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections in the Biodiversity Library. I bet there’s all *kinds* of things in the Smithsonian Miscellaneous […]
My great-grandmother was stressed when she was pregnant AND IT FREAKS ME OUT!
Science Daily has yet more research on the heritability of stress, with research that shows the effects of stress on one pregnant mom can last […]
The next Mars Rover will make its own oxygen from CO2.
Scientific American reports on the technology that’ll help humans explore the Red Planet… first with fuel, then with air to breathe. The next machine to […]
Rosetta is orbiting a comet right now.
Orbiting a planet is not that big a deal – moons do it all the time. And everyone you’ve ever known has orbited a sun. […]
Mysterious crater explained. Not that it helps….
Nature offers one of the least comforting explanations for a mysterious hole in Siberia. It wasn’t from an asteroid or a rogue telephone-pole-installing crew. The […]
The sleepless gene.
Science World Report takes a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed look at the mutation that makes some people chipper, functional early risers: The researchers turned to 100 pairs […]
Science Art: Stephenson’s Patent, 1850.
Click to embiggen From The Principles and Practice and Explanation of the Machinery of Locomotive Engines in Operation, found on archive.org. The book seems to […]