Desert feeds jungle.
Nature reveals a hidden connection between Sahara dust and the Amazon rainforest: Significant amounts of plant nutrients have been found in atmospheric mineral dust blowing […]
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 moreCatch the Perseids.
Big show. Shooting stars. Tomorrow night, night after that. Space.com has some details. Go. Watch the skies.
Radioactive boars rising.
Oh. OK. Discovery is reporting that the population of radioactive boars is increasing in Europe: Radioactive wild boars are on the rise in Germany, where […]
Science Art: Ventricose Cuttlefish, probably by Charles Knight
Click to embiggen A close-up from another page of Charles Knight’s Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature. This may be mistitled – other creatures on the […]
Zeppelin reborn
The Telegraph heralds the future fleet of mighty airships: Hybrid Air Vehicles has built a scale prototype of what will soon be the largest flying […]
Bringing down the sun.
Science Daily has the skinny on cheaper solar power: Stanford engineers have figured out how to simultaneously use the light and heat of the sun […]
Gorilla glass!
The Christian Science Monitor loves primates. On the heels of the flying squirrel discovery, they’re analyzing the economic ramifications of “gorilla glass”: Two to three […]
Need to bother your monkey? Try flying squirrels!
It’s really hard to beat the Christian Science Monitor’s headline on this story…. Monkeys hate flying squirrels, report monkey-annoyance experts: “Human evolution occurred alongside primate […]
Fare thee well, Triceratops.
They came for Pluto. They came for Brontosaurus. And now, BoingBoing reports, they’ve come for Triceratops: maybe we should be calling it torosaurus now, I’m […]
Science Art: Seals, from The Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature.
Click to embiggen Seals and seal hunters, from Charles Knight’s Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature, exact publication date unknown but currently accessible at archive.org. They […]
The mosquito conundrum: Why not kill ’em all?
Nature wades into the controversy, asking scientists what would really happen if we killed all the mosquitoes: A stronger argument for keeping mosquitoes might be […]
Snail spit kills pain.
I have a vague memory of writing a story back in the 1990s about researchers trying to figure out how to use lethal cone snail […]
Super-scum. Again.
This is more covering-the-coverage than flogging a new discovery, but the New York Times is keeping tabs on the process of turning pond scum into […]
Teen motherhood: Evolutionary strategy.
There’s a whole shovel-load of politics wrapped up in this New Scientist report on the evolutionary effects of poverty on human reproduction: There is no […]
Science Art: Venus and the Ark, by Anne Sexton
The missile to launch a missile was almost a secret. Two male Ph.D.’s were picked and primed to fill it and one hundred carefully counted […]