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 […]
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 moreThere’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New Scientist discusses the future of the academy, in which teachers have been replaced by essay-grading robots: Grading software from nine manufacturers, which together cover […]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 […]
Science Art:Dugesia Anatomy Schematic, by Andreas Neudecker
This is a flatworm. A German flatworm. It may be a distant cousin of the planarians that hypnotized Dutch artist M.C. Escher with their two-dimensional […]
SONG: “Inside the Box”
SONG: “Inside the Box.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on “CEOs and the Candle Problem”, Nature, “A Mad Hemorrhage” […]