Remember that exploding meteorite? They just found a half-ton chunk of it.
That space rock that blew up over the Urals (and was captured on a few different cameras)… well, BBC reports that they’ve just hauled a […]
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: Beebe's Bathysphäre, 1934
This is an image of William Beebe’s bathysphere, as placed on Wikimedia Commons by ETH Bibliothek. It was creat…
Read moreScience Art: Power of RCA Electron Microscope, May 1955
These are diatoms, I think, seen by two different microscopes.
As the caption from Popular Electronics says…
Read moreScience Art: Red Pepper, 1910.
Red pepper (Cayenne pepper) will cure almost any case of la grippe within 24 hours, or so they say. At least no…
Read moreScience Art: Figs. 1315-1333 (Various rotary piston engines), 1890.
This is a page of figures from (deep breath) The engineer’s sketch-book of mechanical movements, devices, appli…
Read moreOreos “as addictive as cocaine.”
Outside meanders out of the campground and into the chem lab, following a Connecticut College experiment determining just how strong our junk-food cravings can get. […]
Lasers make the power of tomorrow.
BBC looks ahead to a brighter future… at least as far as our energy supply is concerned. Fusion reactors have gotten one small step closer, […]
Sooty, with a chance of diamonds.
Pennies from Heaven? P’shaw! Nature looks over the vastly overvalued weather report on Saturn and Jupiter: …Mona Delitsky of California Specialty Engineering in Flintridge, and […]
Zombie sex-change pollution
I’m pretty sure Nature is blazing a new B-movie trail with this report on hormone-disrupting chemicals “rising from the dead”: Environmental scientists have discovered that […]
Science Art: Holocentre à grosses épines, from Histoire Naturelle des Poissons, Volume 3, 1828
A Holocentrus hastatum, or Sargocentron hastatus, or red soldier fish. They have big spines, you see. This one comes from A Natural History of Fish, […]
Utopia or catastrophe: How long do civilizations live? (And how can we find another?)
Those questions were raised in, of all publications, Astrobiology Magazine. Why are astrobiologists so concerned about human culture? Because if civilizations can really die out, […]
Cave artists mostly feminine.
National Geographic looks into the caves and reports on the earliest artists’ small, beautiful hands: Archaeologist Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University analyzed hand stencils […]
After the Ice Age, the farmers came
Sweden’s The Local rewrites history with a pre-Viking farm that they’re calling “shocking”: “It is completely unique,” Jan Heinerud at Västerbotten’s Museum in Umeå told […]
Save the (10-foot-long, venomous) snakes!
BBC discusses the challenges faced by Rodrigo Souza, a man who’s dedicated himself to saving an endangered species – the lethal, heat-seeking venomous snake called […]
This beer has the moon in it.
No, not quoting that classical sot Li Bai, but the (mostly) sober-minded folks at Outside, who are now celebrating Dogfish Head’s latest special beer… made […]
Science Art: Broca’s Area (Brodmann’s Area 44 & 45) by Amunts K, Lenzen M, Friederici AD, Schleicher A, Morosan P, et al.
Why is this brain area important? I have no words. Found on Wikimedia Commons.
Reality TV colonizes space.
Yep. Virgin Galactic has announced that it’s sending a reality TV show contestant into space while cameras roll: “Space Race” is a groundbreaking, elimination competition […]
A Super-Earth (with Plasma Water Skies).
Space.com reveals the weirdness of water – neither ice, nor liquid, nor vapor – found on a faraway planet: Astronomers have determined that the atmosphere […]
Mind-controlled robot leg. An actual one. Not made up.
Nature has the details on the bionic limb wired to an amputee’s nerves: A 32-year-old man whose knee and lower leg were amputated in 2009 […]