The mere anticipation of an interaction with a woman can impair men’s cognitive performance.
No one can possibly do better than the Archives of Sexual Behavior in describing this study. The article’s headline says all it needs to: The […]
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 moreMedical science: Not all it’s cracked up to be
Me, I love science. New Scientist does too. So it makes us feel weird to point out that a lot of the time, it just […]
Demotic dictionary, for ancient expressions.
New York Times reviews a new dictionary of a really old language: Demotic was one of the three scripts inscribed on the Rosetta stone, along […]
Message in a bottle. From 98 years ago.
The Atlantic reports on a record-breaking experiment that is reaching a conclusion nearly a century after it started… when a Scottish fisherman found a message […]
Science Art: Heidelberg Man, by Zdenek Burian.
That’s Homo heidelbergensis stopping for a quick sip of water, as imagined by Zdenek Burian. Zdenek Burian was possibly Eastern Europe’s (and maybe the world’s) […]
The mushrooms that make the weather.
Time travels to the Amazon to reveal the fungi that creates the clouds: The clouds in the Amazon, just like everywhere else, consist of water […]
Richard loves Richard, that is, I and I….
New Scientist may have uncovered the bones of Richard III, the king either most villainous or most misunderstood of Plantangenet: What exactly has been found? […]
They call Alzheimer’s “type-3 diabetes” – because it’s caused by junk food.
Guardian reports on the growing body of evidence that Alzheimer’s disease comes from what we eat – that the senility disease might actually be caused […]
The shiniest living thing.
Cambridge researchers have determined that an iridescent berry is the brightest thing in nature: The ‘brightest’ thing in nature, the Pollia condensata fruit, does not […]
The reefs are collapsing.
Guardian takes a look underwater, and what it sees (and, more importantly, what scientists are seeing) really doesn’t look good: The decline of the reefs […]
Science Art: Fig. 100 (Outside-Spring Indicator) from Steam-engine Theory and Practice by William Ripper, 1922
This, the text tells me, is an “outside-spring indicator, by Messrs. Elliott Bros.” The spring is not exposed to high temperature, which makes it better […]
Flying robot maps Surprise Valley
Yep. Scientific American has more on the unmanned aircraft that NASA and the USGS is using to explore the alien landscape of northeastern California: Yesterday […]
The robot knows itself.
Machines, BBC reports, are one step closer to personhood, thanks to Yale researchers inventing Nico, a robot who knows himself: “It is a spatial reasoning […]
Climbing cukes clinch kinky springs.
Say that five times fast. Harvard Gazette wraps its tendrils around a new way to build springs based on the coiling shoots of cucumber vines: […]
Cannabis does lower IQ. By about 8 points.
The Independent has a surprisingly lucid summary of a 25-year longitudinal study of cannabis users from ages 13 to 38. And they found that teen […]