Crab chips for a living computer.
New Scientist blogs about the ultimate Rube Goldberg cybernetic machine – a computer that uses living crabs for processors: Yukio-Pegio Gunji of Kobe University in […]
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 moreWhere intelligence is in the brain.
Medical Xpress sketches out a rough map of where intelligence actually resides: Their study, published in Brain: A Journal of Neurology, is unique in that […]
Cool nanotubes.
PhysOrg unveils the guts of the next supercomputer breakthrough – with carbon nanotubes that, curiously, make things nearby get hot while they stay cool: For […]
Armor-plated plankton getting weaker. And so is the planet.
The world’s future supply of chalk is threatened by global warming. That’s what I take away from this LiveScience report on how the souring of […]
About those CEO bonuses: How financial incentives make us less creative.
Nature blogger Graham Morehead isn’t looking over any new research with this post, which makes it all the more remarkable. Since the early 1960s, we’ve […]
Science Art: Where the sun sets twice, by NASA / JPL-Caltech / R. Hunt
Click to embiggen This is an image of a transit of Kepler 16. What that means is that, from where we’re sitting, it looks like […]
Living snail batteries – and backyard spies.
Science Daily creeps us out with a military-funded project that’s turning snails into living batteries: The electrified snail, being a biotechnological living device, was able […]
The moon is not so lonely.
PhysOrg says our moon has lots of company – little “minimoons” are always stopping by for an orbital visit: Mikael Granvik (formerly at UH Manoa […]
Senators demand giant blimp. (No, really.)
Wired’s Danger Room takes a long look at the Blue Devil project – a 370-foot-long airship that, if some legislators have their way, will be […]
Something is killing lots of dolphins in the Gulf.
Discovery News says the 714 reported dolphin deaths are just the tip of a much larger iceberg: NOAA declared the die-off an “Unusual Mortality Event” […]
The world’s first winemakers were the world’s first beekeepers.
They lived in the Republic of Georgia, says Eurasianet.org, where scientists have just found 5,500-year-old honeypots: The honey stains found in the ceramic vessels, found […]
Science Art: A red blood cell in a capillary, pancreatic tissue – TEM, by Louisa Howard
Click to embiggen Happy blood. April fool blood. Pancreas blood. Turning sweetness to pep blood. Smiling blood. Very, very enlarged blood. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
World’s largest laser gets just a little larger (and closer to making fusion happen).
Scientific American makes me jealous of the physicists at Livermore’s National Ignition Facility, who get to utter orders like, “Now, my assistants! Fire the FUSION […]
The hands ARE NOT CLEAN! (Or: how germs could cause OCD.)
New Scientist reveals a possible irony of microbiology. It could be that obsessive-compulsive disorder – in which the brain gets stuck in loops of repetitive, […]
Grampa Worm!
PhysOrg greets our oldest known ancestor – a very special worm: Researchers from the University of Cambridge, University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum […]