Polar paradox: Warmer planet, larger ice cap.
Nature puzzles over an unforeseen consequence of global warming – an expansion of Antarctic sea ice as the climate warms: While sea ice at the […]
Science 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 moreScience Art: Collops bipunctatus, U, Back, SD, Pennington County, 2013
This image of a Collops bipunctatus, a beetle from the Melyridae family, was taken by Sam Droege from flowers …
Read moreScience Art: Histologist Microscope, 1900
An illustration of an elegant optical device from Science Gossip magazine (a publication which I discovered via…
Read moreScience Art: Rudimentary Simulator, 1963.
This is Figure 3 from “Man-Machine System Simulation for Flight Vehicles” by Steven Belsley, an article which w…
Read moreTiki Brazil (Thor Heyerdahl was right! Maybe.)
Nature, in what was almost certainly not an April Fools’ gag, reports that there’s genetic evidence, now, that Polynesians traveled to the Amazon in days […]
Real money. Virtual currency. Hard rules.
New Scientist adds up the arguments over bitcoins, the computer-generated form of money. We’re now seeing plans to regulate the imaginary currency: Virtual currencies are […]
Why is there something? Anything? Instead of nothing?
NPR asks the biggest question of all – the original question. Look around. Why is there something instead of nothing?: The best answer we have […]
Science Art: Plate VI, from Monograph on the Aye-aye, by Richard Owen, 1863
In 1863, naturalist Richard Owen published 72 pages of joy. Is it related to the lemur? Aye. Does it climb through the jungle at night? […]
Psychedelic sponges. Why?
Vice, of all publications, examines the strange chemistry of the first-known psychedelic sponges… trying to figure out why sponges would make something as potent as […]
After everything, the Higgs boson still dooms us all. In a few billion years.
Scientific American crunches the numbers that show how the mass of the Higgs boson spells the end of the universe… eventually: “If you use all […]
The power of diagrams. The beauty of diagrams.
SciAm blogger Clarissa Ai Ling Lee reflects on the science and art of visualizing information: Of course, there were records of politics, observations of particular […]
Lockheed Martin’s quantum computer steps into the limelight.
New York Times has a pretty good profile of what could be the next big breakthrough in computing – the chips that understand “maybe”: [A] […]
Science Art: Plate 2527 Guarda (a mechanism for protecting airships), by Charles A.A. Dellschau, 1912.
Click to embiggen This may be an important historical record of the early days of aeronautics, or it may be a vivid fantasy by a […]
SONG: “So Heavy”
SONG: “So Heavy” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on “Super-dense celestial bodies could be a new kind of planet,” […]
Earthquakes make instant gold.
OK, well, instant veins of gold, at least. The gold, Nature says, is in the ground already. But it takes an earthquake to make it […]
Cars shape sparrows’ evolution.
Nature demonstrates how (possibly) our machines are transforming birds’ whole existence: Roadside-nesting cliff swallows have evolved shorter, more manoeuvrable wings, which may have helped them […]
Giant squid CLONE ARMY. Or, well, at least a tight family.
BBC reveals that giant squid, no matter where they’re found or how different from each other they look, are all genetically really close to one […]
Artificial stem cells make new blood.
One step closer to androids. That’s where scilogs is bringing us. Making a blood supply for bioengineered organs from scratch: Starting off with fibroblasts…, widespread […]