Holy viruses! (On your computer.)
PhysOrg says that porn is safer than religion… at least when it comes to online viruses: Websites with religious or ideological themes were found to […]
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 moreAtom-thick silicon is the latest miracle STUFF.
New Scientist does its best to make nanomaterials sexy… like the new silicon stuff that’s stealing carbon’s limelight: Patrick Vogt of Berlin’s Technical University in […]
They really can remember for you, wholesale….
The Freakonomics guys look at what it means to be able to make memories from scratch: Psychologists Andrew Clark, Robert A. Nash, Gabrielle Fincham, and […]
There’s a new subatomic particle.
And it’s a USB! Well, that’s what Science Daily says it’s made of, anyway. It’s formally called a “Xi_b^*” and it’s just been spotted at […]
Science Art: CERN-EX-1107175 01 by the LHCB Team at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.
Click to embiggen The formal name for this image: LHCb: Event display presented at the EPS-HEP 2011 conference showing a B0s meson decaying into a […]
Lovecraft report: Proto-organism found in remote lake sludge.
PhysOrg calls it “man’s remotest relative,” a living thing that has no branch on the tree of life. Why can’t they just call a shoggoth […]
Robots make the grade on essay questions.
New Scientist discusses the future of the academy, in which teachers have been replaced by essay-grading robots: Grading software from nine manufacturers, which together cover […]
You will remember… FEAR!
Science News chills us to the bone with the latest breakthrough from Mark Mayford and Susumu Tonegawa, neuroscientists at Scripps and MIT, respectively. They’ve been […]
Coke ages brains.
Scientific American veers into “No, really?” territory with news that cocaine ages your brain prematurely: “As we age we all lose gray matter,” Karen Ersche […]
DNA evidence finds Chinese medicine guilty…
…of killing endangered animals. Or at least Nature hypes up enough evidence to put Chinese medicine on trial: “There’s absolutely no honesty in the labelling […]
Science Art: Amerique, from the Larousse pour tous encyclopedia, 1909.
Click to embiggen This is what America meant for Claude Auge, who edited Le Larousse pour tous nouveau dictionnaire encyclopedique in 1909. Eskimos and tapirs. […]
Here’s why Pioneer slowed down…
Physics World has a solution for the Pioneer Anomaly – the strange slowdown experienced by both Pioneer space probes as they passed beyond the farthest […]
You are a hive mind.
Scientific American is seething with the swarm of possibilities that bring every human decision down to the level of bees: To Dr. Thomas Seeley, a […]
NASA wants your Mars ideas.
The space administration needs YOU – and your vision of what we should do on Mars: “This is a two-way capability open to anyone,” says […]
Darwinian pediatrics: Painkillers are *counterproductive.*
I think I’m much more sympathetic to this viewpoint than might at first appear. New Scientist reports on medical philosophy that holds that when kids […]