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 […]
SONG: 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 moreScience Art: Collops bipunctatus, U, Back, SD, Pennington County, 2013
This image of a Collops bipunctatus, a beetle from the Melyridae family, was taken by Sam Droege from flowers …
Read moreScience Art: Histologist Microscope, 1900
An illustration of an elegant optical device from Science Gossip magazine (a publication which I discovered via…
Read moreScience 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: 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 […]
SONG: nobody else can hear
SONG: “nobody else can hear”. (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: “Super squid sex organ discovered”, BBC News, 7 July 2010, […]
How NASA finds oil.
Unfortunately, as NPR reveals, we’re not talking about the kind that’s still safely underground: The NASA Earth Observatory explains that since ocean waters are never […]
X in uniform.
MAPS has published a study confirming that MDMA really does work in treating post-traumatic stress disorder: Participants treated with a combination of MDMA and psychotherapy […]
If you love a sewage-eating robot, set it free.
So New Scientist recommends in a new report on an artificial gut that allows robots to become self-sustaining: [F]ood-munching robots have been demonstrated in the […]
Read in color!
New Scientist teaches you how to make yourself synaesthetic: Olympia Colizoli at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and colleagues… gave seven volunteers a […]
Science Art: The Microwave Sky, Planck Telescope, 2010
Click to embiggen This image – a composite view of, well, everything – was made by the European Space Agency’s Planck Telescope, an orbiting observatory […]
Get up. Really.
New York Times quotes research that proves exercise won’t save you. It’s the sitting that kills you: …[S]cientists from the University of South Carolina and […]
To cure my wife, you want to transplant my *what*?
New York Times gets to the fundamentals of the strange world of microbes-as-medicine: “She was just dwindling down the drain, and she probably would have […]