Lotto breaker.
Wired unearths the story of a gold-prospecting math whiz… sorry, geological statistician… who cracked the scratch-off ticket code: The trick itself is ridiculously simple. ([Mohan] […]
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 moreKeep looking up. But not THAT high.
I’m sure MSNBC isn’t *trying* to be a downer when they report that too much optimism is bad for cancer patients’ chances of recovery: The […]
Germs against oil.
WaPo and Slate give us the scoop on the Deepwater Horizon aftermath. Why was the Exxon Valdez so much more of a mess? Because the […]
Quantum eyes.
Migrating robins have something better than magnets in their heads, Wired reports. They’ve got quantum sensors in their eyes: European robins may maintain quantum entanglement […]
Science Art: Azerbaijan stamp, 500m – Marine gastropod Corolla spectabilis, May 1995.
The whole collection of Azerbaijan collectors’ stamps is full of scientific illustration treasure – butterflies, dirigibles, mushrooms…. And “treasure” is not an exaggeration. 500 Azerbaijan […]
Mother and child, 100 million B.C.
BBC paints a sweet, fossilized portrait of pterosaur family life: A pterosaur has been found in China beautifully preserved with an egg. The egg indicates […]
Nabokov knew his butterflies.
Vladimir Nabokov. Modern literary genius. Darling of the New York Times. And now, certified brilliant entomological theorist: There were several plausible hypotheses for how the […]
Pink, but not pretty.
LiveScience joins forces with Peggy Orenstein to take on the “pink princess” culture and what it’s doing to our daughters: You spoke to scientists about […]
Cognitive Toolkit Improvement
Edge magazine has rounded up some pretty impressive brainy folks – from J. Craig Ventner to Brian Eno, P.Z. Myers and Martin Rees – and […]
SONG: Leatherback, Crossing.
SONG: “Leatherback, Crossing.”. (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on “Secret voyages of leatherback turtles revealed using transmitters”, Guardian, 5 […]
Science Art: Aerostatic Cabriolet of Tomorrow, by Harry Grant Dart, c. 1905.
Click to embiggen Harry Grant Dart was an illustrator, newspaperman and creator of “The Explorigator” comic strip… and a man in the suffragette era who […]
What infection looks like.
New Scientist has microscopic video of what malaria looks like bursting into a blood cell: Jake Baum at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of […]
A gentler Eoraptor
Nature breaks the news to us that small, fierce prehistoric predator Eoraptor – the “dawn-predator” – might have been a plant-eater all along: Many palaeontologists […]
I’ll have to unpack my rocket ship.
Wired is bursting a few bubbles by reporting that Gliese 581g – the first habitable planet discovered around another star – may not exist at […]
Music makes us high.
ArsTechnica explores the way music intoxicates us – with dopamine: To learn more about the music/brain/stimulation process, the McGill researchers followed subjects through the ‘chills’ […]