“The first human-humanoid handshake in space.”
That’s how ISS Commander Daniel Burbank describes his interaction with Robonaut 2 yesterday. PhysOrg has more on the space station’s new, robot crew member: On […]
Science Art: Rudimentary Simulator, 1963.
This is Figure 3 from “Man-Machine System Simulation for Flight Vehicles” by Steven Belsley, an article which w…
Read moreScience Art: Astrapia Splendidissima, 1895
This is the first illustration in the article “A New Bird of Paradise” by the Hon. Walter Rothschild, published…
Read moreScience Art: Ever See This Before?, 1966.
This is an actual image of a cathode-ray tube, “the furthest advance yet made in man/ machine interface,” used …
Read moreScience Art: Sunrise - Philippine Sea, 2017
This is an image from the “Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth” gallery, maintained by the Earth Science …
Read moreScience Art: Égouts de Paris, by Jules Ferat.
There’s a subtitle here that Google Translate renders as “Sewer cleaning wagon. (System of Chief Engineer Mr. B…
Read moreScience Art: Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, by David K. Stone.
I found the image in the San Diego Air & Space Museum’s “Aerophilately Special Collection” on Flickr; this is a…
Read moreLarge Hadron researchers: “MORE POWER!”
BBC reports that the Large Hadron Collider is driving toward a new breakthrough. All the physicists have to do is put the pedal to the […]
Toxic oil is toxic.
PhysOrg has bad news for the Gulf of Mexico. Oil spills are even more toxic than we thought: The study, spearheaded by the UC Davis […]
Plastic-eating mushrooms clean us up.
TG Daily reports on a new hope for clearing up our old landfills – by feeding the plastic to a very special rain-forest mushroom: Pestalotiopsis […]
Science Art: “Engine of the Veteran Association” from Our Firemen: A History of the New York Fire Department, 1899.
Click to embiggen slightly This device paraded at the inaugurations of President Grover Cleveland and the Statue of Liberty. It also put out fires, nobly, […]
Supplemental: If you really want to see how tDCS works…
The brain-zapping process broken down, in an Informed Consent video: And you can always try making your own device….
Zapping into flow.
New Scientist reawakens that old dream of turning on the creative juices as if you were turning on a tap… or flipping a switch: I […]
Home-cooked Parkinson’s.
BBC reports on neurologists who’ve managed to not only create brain cells in the lab – but to make Parkinson’s-diseased cells from scratch: The breakthrough […]
Tune into the li-fi.
Wired is all aglow over a new wireless transmission system that uses light instead of radio waves: Using off-the-shelf electronics, he can stream videos using […]
Testosterone and bad ideas.
Irish Times reveals the link between lousy decision-making and the hormone linked to lust and aggression: Dr Nick Wright and colleagues at the Wellcome Trust […]
Skin becomes brain
BBC News ponders what it means for our bodies when Stanford University professors start shuffling around our cellular building blocks. Not turning stem cells into […]
Science Art: Quiet Engine Sonic Inlet, NASA Glenn Research Center
Let us take a moment, while contemplating the sleek engineering of the quiet engine sonic inlet, to consider that tie. That man is not a […]
Inside magic mushrooms… inside the MRI
Imperial College, London, is learning what makes psilocybin mushrooms *trippy* – and what that means for our brains: Professor David Nutt, from the Department of […]
Lovecraft report: Scientists set to disturb primordial lake, deep under Antarctic ice.
Who knows what dim, multiform entities could yet lurk for silent millennia beneath that hostile, white blanket of impervious snow and unrelenting wind? Washington Post […]
Python problem grows in the Everglades
National Geographic is watching South Florida with a growing sense of unease over the alien monsters eating any creature who wanders into the Everglades: …[T]his […]