How Vikings found the sun.
The Telegraph finds the truth behind a navigational legend – a stone that Vikings used locate the sun on cloudy days: Now experiments have shown […]
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 moreTurning on the first tractor beams.
BBC reports on three ways scientists are bringing tractor beams into reality: The $100,000 (£63,000) award will be used to examine three laser-based approaches to […]
Who owns your face? (biometrics, meet property rights)
The Future Perfect blog chases down what it might mean once we use our faces online: One of the reoccurring conversations in the US that […]
Photon machines
Science Daily points the way for the next information revolution. Not using electrons, but light itself: The merging of two technologies under development — plasmonics […]
Science Art: Examining Plankton Haul, Plankton Hydrographic Cruise, Research Vessel Atlantis by O.E. Sette, 1935
Marine biology from the Diesel Age. Crowded organisms, barely visible through the equipment. (And I’m talking about the researchers.) Photo from NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science […]
Living shoggoths.
MSNBC (among other sources) reports on the amorphous, multiform, shuddering things that live and ooze in a crawling chaos across the deepest ocean floor: Gigantic […]
Dinosaur migration
Must’ve been something to see. The Telegraph gives a new picture of what it was like when hundreds of dinosaurs went a-walking: The journey would […]
Air miner.
Lando. Lando Calrissian. Cloud miner. Sounds like a great space opera profession, doesn’t it? But National Geographic is talking about exploiting the atmosphere for fuel: […]
Garage biology. (Like garage rock.)
The Daily is reporting on a revolution. DIY researchers are leaving the academy to take a punk rock approach to science: Three years ago, [Mackensie] […]
SONG: Move It Close to You.
SONG: “Move It Close to You.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on “Mind-guided robotic arm lets paralyzed man touch […]
Science Art: Wattles of Cock Tragopans, by William Beebe, from A Monograph on Pheasants, 1918-1922.
The artist and writer William Beebe is better known for his deep sea explorations than his wattle portraiture. He studied at Columbia, but spent too […]
The 147 corporations that run everything.
New Scientist looks at where and how business happens – and reveals that out of 37 million global companies, it’s only a very few who […]
A Viking burial.
From around 900 CE, in a boat on Scotland’s west coast, comes a dead Viking warrior. BBC reports on the most complete Norse grave site […]
Spies turn to Twitomancy
That’s the use of Twitter for divination purposes. And, Nature says, is now an official field of government intelligence research: The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects […]
Polio spreads.
BBC says the disease, once thought practically eradicated, is now moving out into China from Pakistan: Polio has been found in China for the first […]