Riding airships into orbit.
Discovery is looking up to a way to get satellites into orbit using balloons instead of rockets: …[T]he now-retired NASA space shuttle was the Hindenburg […]
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 moreNoise hurts. Why?
Science explores why the noise of nails on a chalkboard is so awful: As they will report next week at the Acoustical Society of America […]
Mayo Clinic stops aging.
Or, BBC says, at least the symptoms of aging, like wrinkles and cataracts. Mayo Clinic researchers may have found a fountain of youth: The study, […]
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 […]
Turning 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 […]