Kamikaze moon robot back on track.
The Register is watching the skies as LADEE, NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer probe, heads for its ultimate fate: LADEE took off atop […]
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: Fulleride Cs3C60 by Dmitri Zaitsev and Joffe Ilya Naftolevich
This is a buckyball crystal, a form of carbon that no one had ever seen until the 1980s. Now, it’s starting to get used in […]
Sleep makes the brain cells grow.
BBC has one good reason to get a good night’s sleep tonight – because sleep boosts the number of healthy brain cells in yer head: […]
Apollo legend dishes dirt on NASA.
Or at least speaks his mind, now that he’s retired. Houston Chronicle lets Chris Kraft, NASA’s first flight director, put it all out there on […]
Graphene makes *different* computer chips.
University of California, Riverside, researchers have made a very small breakthrough in the way computers work… one that might lead to big changes soon. They’re […]
Science Art: “How to Get Ahead in Science? Simple.” Jim Kelly, Houston Press, August 19, 1991.
Ever since the Buckyball story broke big last year, Rice University chemist Rick Smalley has been getting the phone calls. Rick, they say, this is […]
They’re growing miniature human brains from stem cells.
Reuters plunges headlong into THE FUTURE with Austrian researchers who are growing miniature brains – “cerebral organoids” – from stem cells: To create their brain […]
Science Art: Catafalque at a Funeral at Hubbatale, ca. 1925 from “Mortuary ritual of the Badagas of Southern India” by Paul Hockings.
Found on Archive.org’s collection of Fieldiana. A “catafalque” is a kind of dais on which a coffin rests when it’s on display, as for a […]
Thinking about science makes us better people.
Scientific American shies away from putting it that bluntly, but still. Psychologists at UC Santa Barbara found that just considering the scientific method, in all […]
NASA engages the warp drive.
Space.com brings us hurtling into the future with the science of quantum thrusters… a real-life warp drive: A warp-drive-enabled spacecraft would look like a football […]
Death is slow. Slower than we thought.
Discovery takes a long look at a slow death… watching life leave cell by cell… bit by bit: David Gems from the Institute of Health […]
Overseer of the longest experiment has passed on.
RIP, John Mainstone, custodian of the Pitch Drop Experiment. Solid or liquid, it will continue to ooze so slowly. New Straits Times marks the
Science Art: Astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz spreads bean dip on a tortilla, from The Astronaut’s Cookbook, 2010
This NASA snapshot was found in the archive.org copy of Charles Bourland and Gregory Vogt’s The Astronaut’s Cookbook, Springer Science+Business Publications, 2010. The bottom half […]
SONG: “Regenerative Medicine”
SONG: “Regenerative Medicine” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on “Decellularized Mouse Heart Beats Again After Regenerating With Human Heart […]
Plants hear herbivores coming. No, really.
National Geographic reveals what really goes on in a plant’s… mind?… when sap-thirsty plant killers are on the prowl: [University of Wisconsin researcher John] Orrock […]