Weird carbon goes *plasmonic*.
Graphene, as we all now know, is the latest strange form of carbon to wow material scientists with its unusual properties. Well, New Scientist shows […]
Science Art: Mirounga leonina 01, by H. Zell
This is a southern elephant seal, the largest marine mammal that isn’t a whale. They’re about twice as weighty …
Read moreScience Art: What can make any tape recorder sound a little more like an Ampex?, 1963.
This is an ad for Ampex tape from the August 1963 edition of Electronics Australia, a magazine (which I found o…
Read moreScience Art: Cygnus region in emission lines, 2025
This is a photo of space with a bit of color amplification so we can tell what we’re looking at. Nebulas on the…
Read moreScience Art: Heart apical two-chamber view myocardial regions, by Patrick Lynch
This is an illustration of a particular perspective in a cardiac echocardiogram. An “apical view” is one of the…
Read moreSONG: Sleeping Cathedrals
SONG: “Sleeping Cathedrals”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “World’s biggest whale g…
Read moreScience Art: Build Your Own Lie Detector, 1955
This is the opener for an article in the May 1955 issue of Popular Electronics. You can read the article here, …
Read moreMutant women have super vision.
But do they need supervision? Discover reports on the the rare humans who can see colors the rest of us can’t: Living among us are […]
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 […]
Mother’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 […]