“Special K” for depression.
Into the K-hole and out of altogether darker hole… NPR looks at the new use for an old club drug (and veterinary anesthetic): [O]ne of […]
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 moreScience Art: Leavitt Pumping Engine, from Appletons’ cyclopaedia of applied mechanic, 1880.
Click to embiggen vastly E.D. Leavitt, Massachusetts mechanical engineer, designed many huge machines in the 1870s.They moved things, macerated and mangled them, mined and melted […]
The Walking Dead anatomy lesson.
Popular Mechanics recently investigated the forensics of the zombie head shot: Dr. Steven Schlozman, has written extensively about the brain function of undead zombies (as […]
Building cells from the outside in.
Scientists have come one step closer to creating artificial life by building a cell membrane from scratch: “We don’t understand this really fundamental step in […]
The new U: Take the red pill
The Chronicle of Higher Education is watching closely as a tenured Stanford professor leaves his secure job to teach at an online startup: Sebastian Thrun, […]
Drones of Titan
I never thought that within my lifetime, we’d be planning – as PopSci reports – to send flying robots to find aliens on Saturn’s moons: […]
SONG: Bioluminescence at the Dragon Vent
SONG: “Bioluminescence at the Dragon Vent.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: Squid Pro Crow. SOURCE: Based on “Exotic creatures discovered living at […]
Science Art: From United States Steel International, a porfolio of probabilities, by Syd Mead
Click to embiggen This early ’60s vision of the future (in all likelihood, right now) was painted by visual futurist Syd Mead, who worked in […]
Sharks eat whatever they want. Even songbirds.
National Geographic ruins the illusion that maybe larks and mockingbirds might be safe from shark attacks. Nope. Songbirds are being found in tiger sharks’ stomachs: […]
The Great Apes of Europe.
Science Daily tries to figure out what the Greek gorilla or Austrian orangutan were really like: To date scientists have assumed that great apes went […]
SOPA and PIPA and TEMPORARY BLACKOUT
SOPA and PIPA probably seem like good ideas at first glance, but they aren’t. They really aren’t.
Rock star buried in the Valley of the Kings
The Independent goes way back, digging up the history of the diva of the pharaohs: It is the only tomb of a woman not related […]
Visionary Mayan tobacco.
Discovery savors the very faint aroma of a 1,300-year-old Mayan tobacco flask – the first physical evidence that Mayans used super-strong tobacco: None of the […]
Science Art: Pfd-symbols, from the free open source program, Dia.
Image from Wikimedia Commons. These symbols show steps in various chemical processes – the things you can do to change substances. Well, the things chemical […]
Fight to be tiniest.
WaPo covers the war between a newly discovered frog and an itsy bitsy fish over which one is the smallest vertebrate: An article Wednesday in […]