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 […]
Science Art: Body-centered cubic (bcc) unit cell of iron, 2009
If you were curious about the crystalline structure of iron mentioned in the last post, here it is — a molecul…
Read moreScience Art: MOON: For the Benefit of Humanity, 2023
It’s a poster made by NASA for lunar exploration, showing some landers, space stations, and sample-taking equip…
Read moreScience Art: Bubble chamber with colour enhanced tracks, 2026
This is a CERN image from January 6, 2026, showing something that happened in the 1960s, but enhanced for 21st-…
Read moreScience Art: Dissection of Asterias rubens, by Hans Hillewaert.
Starfish anatomy.
If you want to know the parts, according to Dutch Wikipedia, they are:
Read moreLegend
1 Arm
2…
Science Art: Jupiter's Family of Comets, 1898
This is a diagram from A New Astronomy For Beginners, a textbook that’s about a century and a quarter old, or a…
Read moreSONG: Your Catalogue
SONG: “Your Catalogue”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: NBC News, “New wild cat species is ide…
Read moreRead 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 […]
Super squid penis. (No, this is not spam.)
BBC recently covered the salacious details when scientists discovered a squid’s enormous sexual organ: The male squid’s sexual organ is almost as long as its […]
Prozac pollution and shrimp suicide.
BBC News reports that antidepressant runoff is encouraging shrimp to go toward the white light: The researchers say this causes the shrimps to forget to […]
Humans: warming the globe for 15,000 years.
New Scientist steals my innocent view of humankind before the Industrial Revolution. It turns out we were probably messing up the climate in the Ice […]
Science Art: Giovanni de Dondi’s Astrarium, 1364.
This is a modern tracing of a 1461 illustration of a 1364 drawing of a mechanical clock that represented the movement of the universe.
Leonardo da Vinci: Paleontologist.
Smithsonian reveals yet another secret talent from the original Renaissance man. He was a forefather of fossil science: In a new paper in the journal […]
Addicted to heartbreak
The same circuit that controls your jonesin’ for just one more is also, the American Physiological Society says, in charge of your heartbreak: The pain […]
We’re gonna need a bigger boat. MUCH bigger.
Fossil-hunters have found the remains of a creature they’re calling Melville’s Leviathan, AP reports. It’s a whale that, 12 million years ago, snacked on humpbacks […]
Song of the God Particle.
The BBC has a simulation of the sound of the Higgs boson. That’s what the harmonics of the mass-bearing subatomic particle will sound like if […]
Science Art: Venice, Italy, by Landsat 7, 2001.
Click to embiggen vastly Funny how Venice itself looks like Venetian glass from far enough away, ain’t it? From NASA’s Landsat 7 archive. Happy birthday, […]
Blimps build a better tomorrow.
The Guardian buoys my spirits with a vision of low-pollution, lighter-than-air travel: The government’s former chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David King, now director of […]