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 […]
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 moreRobots 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New Scientist discusses the future of the academy, in which teachers have been replaced by essay-grading robots: Grading software from nine manufacturers, which together cover […]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” […]
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 […]
Where 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 […]