Treasure in the mud.
Nature uncovers a wealth of rare earth lying beneath the ocean floor: The rare-earth elements — metals such as lanthanum and neodymium — are used […]
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 moreScience Art: Build Your Own Lie Detector, 1955
This is the opener for an article in the May 1955 issue of Popular Electronics. You can read the article here, …
Read moreZombie stars and dark energy
There’s a new kind of star in the skies… or at least a new name for some of them, reports Universe Today. They’re larger-than-usual Type […]
Science Art: Fig. 179. – Profile view of a human embryo of about three weeks, showing the cephalic visceral arches and clefts and their relations to the arterial arches, from Quain’s Elements of Anatomy, 1898
This is a human embryo, from the first volume of an 1898 textbook for college students. The book was actually first published in the 1840s, […]
A window of skin
New Scientist sees through me like glass. In fact, my skin could be better than glass: In 2007, Allard Mosk and colleagues at Twente University […]
Fear remembers.
Next time you’re stuck trying to get Boyle’s Law or some cute person’s email into your memory, think of something awful. That’s MSNBC’s solution, based […]
Plastic isn’t sexy.
Not just looking at – being around it. Science Daily has the skinny on how BPA is making male mice less attractive to females: The […]
Google vs. Nonsense
In my day job, I’m not a scientist – I’m a writer. So it pleases me immensely to see this New York Times piece on […]
Evolution machine
Genetic engineers have, in the latest New Scientist, devised a device that (deviously) speeds up the process of evolution: For instance, a yeast engineered to […]
Science Art: Hubble Confirms Existence of Massive Black Hole at Heart of Active Galaxy, by Holland Ford, et al. (5/25/1994)
From the image’s archive.org page: A schematic diagram of velocity measurements of a rotating disk of hot gas in the core of active galaxy M87. […]
Uncut lovers.
That’s Denmark for you. The International Journal of Epidemiology published an article from Danish researchers who found circumcision isn’t all that great in the sack: […]
SONG: “Humidity”
SONG: “Humidity.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on Star Found Shooting Water “Bullets”, National Geographic, 13 June 2011, as […]
Test-tube steak will save Earth.
PhysOrg hops on the in-vitro meat bandwagon with a study that concludes lab-grown meat will lower greenhouse gas emissions by 96 percent: The analysis, carried […]
Robot astronauts.
I suppose automation just made the Space Shuttle obsolete (or, well, something like that). MSNBC reports that the latest supply ship to the ISS is […]
A dying flash.
CSM takes a somber look at a star essentially giving a final wave as it’s swallowed by a black hole: Using Swift observations and others […]
Science Art: Farnsworth–Hirsch Fusor (U.S. Patent 3,386,883)
The innards of a nuclear reactor, from a relatively recent patent application. That is, 1966. By inventor Philo T. Farnsworth. It’s a fusor, which is […]