Musical selection. (Or how to evolve a hit.)
Science News examines one system for making music – by taking noise and using thumbs-up or thumbs-down votes to refine it: Inspired in part by […]
Science Art: Rudimentary Simulator, 1963.
This is Figure 3 from “Man-Machine System Simulation for Flight Vehicles” by Steven Belsley, an article which w…
Read moreScience Art: Astrapia Splendidissima, 1895
This is the first illustration in the article “A New Bird of Paradise” by the Hon. Walter Rothschild, published…
Read moreScience Art: Ever See This Before?, 1966.
This is an actual image of a cathode-ray tube, “the furthest advance yet made in man/ machine interface,” used …
Read moreScience Art: Sunrise - Philippine Sea, 2017
This is an image from the “Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth” gallery, maintained by the Earth Science …
Read moreScience Art: Égouts de Paris, by Jules Ferat.
There’s a subtitle here that Google Translate renders as “Sewer cleaning wagon. (System of Chief Engineer Mr. B…
Read moreScience Art: Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, by David K. Stone.
I found the image in the San Diego Air & Space Museum’s “Aerophilately Special Collection” on Flickr; this is a…
Read moreMother’s milk really is safe – it kills HIV.
New Scientist makes one more argument for breast-feeding, with research that shows breast milk seems to wipe out the virus that causes AIDS: Previous research […]
Reading the minds of comatose patients.
Nature profiles Adrian Owens, a man who uses brain scans to communicate with patients in a persistent vegetative state: Adrian Owen still gets animated when […]
Science Art: Mysis2kils: Mysis Zooplankton by Uwe Kils.
Dark field microscopy is the art of using indirect light to illuminate specimens under your microscope lens; because the light is indirect, it doesn’t shine […]
Neanderthals made beautiful things.
Guardian sheds new light on our so-called primitive cousins, the Neanderthals, by looking at the the oldest cave paintings ever found: Now comes what could […]
GZA from Wu-Tang is making an album… with Neil DeGrasse Tyson (and other scientists)
What more needs to be said? Wall Street Journal has the skinny on Dark Matter: On an early May afternoon in the offices of Neil […]
Bad science comes back: Eugenics pops up in Eastern Europe.
Nature has an item for the Eye-Rolling Desk at the Bureau of Bad Science. Hungarian officials are taking a hard look at a genetic analysis […]
How are they immune to HIV?
That’s the mysterious question MedicalXpress may be answering with their look at a study of people infected with HIV who never come down with AIDS: […]
The oldest instruments ever played.
BBC gets into some *really* vintage sound, grooving with the world’s oldest flutes: The flutes, made from bird bone and mammoth ivory, come from a […]
Science Art: Figure 134, from “Face,” by Richard Partridge, in The Cyclopaedia of Anatomy and Physiology, 1839
Things will get better. This somber fellow illustrated the “Face” article in Robert Bentley Todd’s Cyclopaedia of Anatomy and Physiology. He was drawn by Richard […]
What’s behind your car?
PhysOrg knows, thanks to this math professor’s blind-spot-eliminating side-view mirror: A side mirror that eliminates the dangerous “blind spot” for drivers has now received a […]
How mosquitoes dodge the rain.
Nature opens a window on a thing that has always puzzled me, and probably anyone who’s been in mosquito country in the rainy season. How […]
Worship of the White Shaman
Discover gets some of that OLD time Texas religion, decoding who, what and how the White Shaman of the Rio Grande really worshipped: The land […]
Why don’t we know what blew up in 774?
Nature asks a question that gets more peculiar the more one considers it. A Japanese researcher looking at tree rings from two ancient cedars found […]
Grandad’s got a better password than you, kiddo.
In all likelihood, that is. New Scientist doesn’t actually *know* your password, of course. But they know that if you’re over 55, you’re more likely […]