Meteor explodes over Urals. I’m not making that up.
You may have heard about this by now, but a 10-ton chunk of space rock slammed into the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia, and exploded, RT […]
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 more“Breathe, supernova! Now PUSH!” (Watching a black hole being born.)
CNet reports on NASA researchers who may have snapped the first pictures of a new black hole being born: Caught on film by NASA’s Chandra […]
This is how you scare the fearless. Neurologically.
Nature examines the biology of fear – and how researchers have succeeded in creating fear in the fearless: Many studies on animals over the years […]
“Bituqen” is Proto-Polynesian for “star.” A computer figured that out.
Nature reports on the algorithm researchers have devised to find (or recreate) the ancestors of modern languages: Statistician Alexandre Bouchard-Côté of the University of British […]
Not just an asteroid. What *else* killed the dinosaurs?
Slate examines the mysteries of the mass extinction that killed all the dinosaurs… except the birds: “Dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid 65 million years […]
Science Art: Exploring the Universe, from Looking Into Science supplements, 1965
This came from a series of supplements in California textbooks in the 1960s – the peak of the Space Race. This is an image of […]
“I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing?)” by Cmdr. Chris Hadfield, Ed Robertson, Barenaked Ladies & The Wexford Gleeks
Does this sound schmaltzy? Usually things with a full choir and a key change after the bridge sound schmaltzy. I honestly can’t tell – judgement […]
Commander Hadfield gets together with Barenaked Lady.
No, he’s not doing *that* on the ISS. The commander is, like The Postal Service, making music via a long-distance collaboration… only his is with […]
Real fake medicine isn’t really fake. It’s real. But how real?
Harvard researcher Ted Kaptchuk is mastering the medical secrets of sleight-of-mind by figuring out how to use placebos as real medicine: Last year, he and […]
Black hole, light show.
Time is dibsing front-row seats to the (potentially) big show when a black hole slurps down a gas cloud this fall: Back in 2011, astronomers […]
Journals without publishers.
Sounds unnatural or absurd, doesn’t it? But that’s what the internet is making possible, according to Nature (whose publishers should be a little worried). Researchers […]
Science Art: Appareil Electromedical de G. Trouvet, from La Nature, 1878
This device is “a regulateur des intermittences”, according to La Nature. I’m not sure what “intermittences” are exactly, but Gustave Trouvet was going to fix […]
Watching the thoughts of fishes.
That’s what Science Daily says scientists have been doing when they hook up a probe precise enough to detect a single idea begin to form […]
Not solar panels – solar *cones*. That spin to keep cool.
Grist gives hope for affordable renewable energy from the engineers who’ve discovered that cones can make solar power cheaper than coal: The company is called […]
Don’t sleep. Forget. You are growing old.
Nature explores why our aging brains succumb to insomnia and forgetfulness at the same time: Ageing is associated with the gradual loss of brain cells, […]