Light batteries
University of Michigan engineers are taking a bright new approach to solar power: The researchers found a way to make an “optical battery,” said Stephen […]
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 more“Cute” don’t pay.
At least not when it comes to dates. Evolutionary Psychology finds that pretty people expect free rides: [St. Andrews psychologists] set up hypothetical blind dates […]
Grapefruit vs. bugs.
NPR’s reporting sounds almost too good to be true as it extols the virtues of an all-natural, edible grapefruit extract that repels mosquitoes, ticks and […]
Eyes of stone.
LiveScience takes a hard look at the stony gaze of the chiton: While scientists had discovered the hundreds of eye-like structures on the surface of […]
Science Art: Chiton from Brehm’s Tierleben, 1860s
Click to embiggen A pair of chitons, playing catch. Or sleeping. Or enjoying a good meal. Or singing a chiton opera. With chitons, it’s very […]
Buck-toothed demon.
Yeah, National Geographic is really helping paleontologists rehabilitate the popular image of dinosaurs as mindless killers with the latest… well… actually, I guess the blame […]
Northern Lights… from above.
This video was shot out of the window of a night flight from San Francisco to Paris, one frame every two miles: [via Yahoo!News]
Do you see it once you feel it?
Researchers have finally found an empirical answer, PhysOrg reports, to a centuries-old conceptual puzzler known as Molyneux’s question. If a person who’s been blind since […]
War games.
DVice.com fulfills that long-held suspicion (in some circles) about videogames and military recruiting with a report on new games actually produced by the Pentagon: ACTUV […]
Science Art: Imagining Mars, NASA-JPL, 1975
Click to embiggen This is what an artist in 1975 (or perhaps three artists) thought the future of Mars looked like. From the NASA-JPL description: […]
Davy Jones’ shipping containers.
You might have heard the phrase “acceptable losses” being tossed around in corporate contexts, but Singularity Hub’s taken a closer look at a shipping phenomenon […]
Go find Genghis Khan. Yes, YOU.
Washington Post extends an invitation to you – and to everyone else – to search for the tomb of the Mongol emperor: Through a Web […]
Mangroves save us. (If we save them.)
Nature reports on a hidden side of wetlands conservation, with the discovery that those snorkel-rooted mangrove trees – which are getting pretty scarce most places […]
First-person dream shooters.
Live Science reports on the nightmare-killing dreams of the hardcore gamer: By contrast, soldiers who did not play video games much suffered from more emotional […]
The jug or the loaf?
“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is a question for paleontologists. Anthropologists ask a much more vexing question about bread and beer – […]