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 […]
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 moreZombie 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 […]
Google Street View goes inside the Large Hadron Collider.
Says it all right there. You want to see inside the world’s largest particle accelerator? Street View will take you into the underground tunnels: We’re […]
NASA launching 3D printer into space.
ABC (the American network) asks why send a toolbox into orbit when you can send one tool that makes all the other ones?: In NASA […]
Science Art: Sangüesa, S. Maria La Real, Portal, Queens on West Side, by Georgiana Goddard King, 1915.
A plate from the American Journal of Archaeology, Volume 19, “French Figure Sculpture on Some Early Spanish Churches.” Photographed from below a deep basement. That’s […]