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: 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 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 […]