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: 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: 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 […]
It makes them EAT THEIR OWN BRAINS. And even worse….
It’s a bacterium. It preys on insects. And Scientific American makes me worry that one way or another, they’ll figure out a way to make […]
Science Art: Oeufs 2b, 29, by Adolphe Millot, Nouveau Larousse Illustré [1897-1904]
It’s an egg! A jacana laid it on some tropical riverbank or lake shore sometime in the 1800s, just so Alphonse Millot could come along […]
So maybe that reduced-calorie diet won’t extend your life after all….
NIH reports that cutting calories by two-thirds, contrary to what you might expect, might not add years to your lifespan: Scientists have found that calorie […]