Supersymmetry sideswiped. (“No, it doesn’t work that way!” says LHC.)
BBC reports that the Large Hadron Collider is messing up a perfectly neat theory about how the universe fits together: Supersymmetry, or SUSY, has gained […]
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 moreBizarre penis shaved by scientists
I can’t beat Science Nordic’s headline. They’re talking about some tragically vicious beetle anatomy: The many spines on the penis are just as nasty, sharp […]
Old process makes new fuels. By turning sugar into diesel.
UC Berkeley looks back to an old (and abandoned) method for making explosives and tweaks it to make renewable biofuels: Campus chemists and chemical engineers […]
Science Art: Aardvark (Kapisches Erdferkel, Orycteropus capensis Gm. S. 147), from Brehm’s Tierleben, 1927
We’ve talked before about Alfred Brehm. These are his aardvarks. Earth-pigs. After “trek,” one of the best-known Afrikaans words to make it into English. Literally, […]
Little things. Big pictures.
Nikon (through Wired) presents some of the most amazing windows onto the microscopic world ever seen: Super-close-ups of garlic, snail fossils, stinging nettle, bat embryos, […]
Egyptian princess found. (Not alive.)
PhysOrg has the details on the latest royal presence in Cairo: Czech archaeologists have unearthed the 4,500-year-old tomb of a Pharaonic princess south of Cairo, […]
Cold planet Mars.
Nature reveals a setback in the search for life on Mars. We’re learning more about the atmosphere there, and there doesn’t seem to be enough […]
SONG: Cloudbusting (by Kate Bush) (a penitential cover)
SONG: “Cloudbusting” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: This is a penitential cover. I was late with the last song. This […]
Science Art: Fig. 2, A detailed view of Earth’s magnetosphere… from Earth Orbital Science, Space in the Seventies by WR Corliss, 1971.
We had big plans then, two years after we’d landed on the Moon. We had to be prepared. found on archive.org (pdf).
Happy 12 years in space, ISS astronauts.
Mount Washington Valley Astronomy marks a dozen years of humans living in space: On the 12th anniversary of crews continuously living and working aboard the […]
12-year-old solves psych problem with Monster Manual.
Yep. It’s the beholder. Discover shows how a D&D-playing kid helped solve a longstanding problem with how humans react to eyes: In 1998, [University of […]
Alien communication: More like Twitter, less like War and Peace.
Digital Journal points out that we might already be in contact with aliens – we’re just not looking for the right kind of messages: The […]
SONG: Is There A Light?
SONG: “Is There A Light?” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on “New Planet Is Closest Yet: Earth-Size Lava World […]
Science Art: Solar Interstellar Neighborhood, by Andrew Z. Colvin
Click to embiggen. Hi, neighbors. Map found on Wikimedia Commons. It’s part of a larger series showing where we are relative to everything. Everything.
Step one: obtain a 3,000-gallon iron cauldron.
Nature has a great pictorial guide called How to eat a Triceratops: Denver Fowler at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, and his […]