Renaissance grave reveals what it takes to kill a vampire.
LiveScience unearths a scientific controversy over what seems to be a plague victim’s corpse defaced by vampire hunters: The controversy begins with a mass grave […]
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 more“Splashdown Successful!”
Elon Musk celebrates his historic spacecraft’s return home – in less than 140 characters.
So the anarchists are killing scientists now…
I’m getting this from Nature, although New Scientist has also been covering it. A group called “the Olga Cell of the Informal Anarchist Federation International […]
Cannabis pills not effective against MS.
BBC breaks some not-terribly-encouraging news from the stoner desk. Neuromedical researchers have found marijuana-based meds don’t slow the progress multiple sclerosis: Lead researcher, Professor John […]
Science Art: Figure 1, “Biosystematic Studies in Papaver, Section Oxytona,” Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 1974
Click to embiggen Poppies. For Memorial Day. Funny how that saturated color automatically looks so 1970s now, when all they were trying to do was […]
Science Art: Plate II, Mitchill’s Fishes of New-York, by Alexander Anderson, 1815.
Alexander Anderson, medical doctor and illustrator, is remembered as America’s first wood engraver. He helped Samuel Mitchill explain what that was wriggling on the end […]
Pesticides make bees… picky.
PhysOrg finds something weird about the nicotine-based pesticides that seem to be making trouble for bees. Neonicotinoids make them picky eaters: The UC San Diego […]
MIT: Facebook is about to kill the Internet. (Seriously?)
MIT’s Technology Review is not a publication ordinarily given to hyperbole. So it’s a little distracting when their web desk declares that Facebook is heading […]
Putty fixes bones like chair legs.
The health desk at The Atlantic might be looking a little bit like a wood shop, thanks to their reporting on the medical marvels of […]
Turning pollution into gold.
PhysOrg gets me all het up over this modern-day alchemist who’s figured out how to transmute greenhouse gases into useful materials… and energy: Making carbon-based […]
When bad science happens…
…bad consequences follow. Forbes traces the problems with the most authoritative “we can cure the gay out of you” study: [Dr. Robert L.] Spitzer now […]
Science Art: Paillettes de glace eclairées par les rayons du soleil observées en ballon, by M. Albert Tissandier
Click to embiggen When you’re a pioneering aviator, it pays to have a brother who’s an illustrator. From the Tissandier collection in the Library of […]
Doctor, make me forever young.
Science Daily reaches out its withered hands to hold up the promise of a viral cure for aging: Researchers at the Spanish National Cancer Research […]
I can honestly conceive of nothing less pleasant than this.
Discover launches a thousand new phobia cases with their expose (and I cannot do better than their headline here) Hidden Epidemic: Tapeworms in the Brain: […]
According to Public Enemy, I should now be very afraid…
National Geographic unveils Kepler’s latest discovery – a really black planet: Orbiting only about three million miles out from its star, the Jupiter-size gas giant […]