The birds and, uhhh….
Scientific American reveals the emotional life of bees. Yes, insects do have emotional lives: Recently, studies by Geraldine Wright and her colleagues at Newcastle University […]
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 moreThe Twitter trenches
Time reveals more of the Pentagon’s social media warfare research: The new Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program was submitted under the Defense Advanced […]
Cleaning the world’s plate.
A new U.N. report (over at Scientific American) shows we’re actually wasting 300 million Hummer H2s’ weight of food every year: What is more interesting […]
Goblin holes!
Der Spiegel probes the long-buried secrets of the Erdstalls – Bavaria’s ancient underground mazes: At least 700 of these chambers have been found in Bavaria […]
Science Art: Bulbi olfattorii, by Camillio Golgi, 1875
From the mustachioed microscope-gazer who gave us the method (for staining specimens), the receptor (inside our tendons) and the bodies (inside our cells) comes a […]
The math of the madness of crowds.
Ten percent. That’s all it takes to start a mob or to sell a coup d’etat. ScienceBlog digs up the numbers we need to make […]
“Trojan asteroid”? More like puppy dog….
The IBT (and a bunch of other news outlets) are making this discovery – an asteroid that’s been orbiting Earth – are making it sound […]
The human problem: long life and shrinking brains.
BBC News uncovers a strange complex of problems that humans have and chimps don’t. We get old. On the one hand, we live a long […]
Doctor dolphin
Georgetown University researchers want to know why – and how – dolphins are so good at healing themselves: A dolphin’s ability to heal quickly from […]
Fame more than kindness.
A sad fact from Science Daily – kids’ TV shows are teaching them that it’s better to be famous than it is to be kind: […]
Science Art: Julbock, Nordisk familjebok, 1910.
This is a Julbock – a “Yule goat” – from a very special category on Wikimedia Commons.
Song delay
What, it’s the 23rd and there’s no song? Yes, it’s true. I’m moving (yet again) and have been unable to record between the packing and […]
Tea’s secrets revealed – by kid detectives.
New York Times recognizes the work of some teenage sleuths in finding what’s really in that fancy herbal tea: Catherine C. Gamble, a senior who […]
One letter can decide an election.
Getting people to turn out to vote can be a real chore. But, PhysOrg reveals, it gets a little easier if you talk about “voters” […]
Orbiting Vesta
NASA’s not landing on the moon – it’s not even firing off Space Shuttles any more – but it IS taking a long, close look […]