Science Art: Le Physale Cylindrique, Histoire naturelle de Lacépède, 1876.
Click to embiggen Another gorgeous old book illustration from Old Book Illustrations, this one from a Belgian natural history text. It’s a beached sperm whale, […]
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 moreMaking pavement pay.
Covered this as a concept before here, but PhysOrg is reporting that a town in France is making step-powered pavement a reality: Authorities in Toulouse […]
Obama brings back Orion capsule.
Discovery News makes me curious, again, about the future of American space travel: President Obama is reviving the capsule component of the scuttled Constellation program […]
An older testament.
The Vancouver Sun unearths the story of a possible Assyrian source for the Hebrew covenant: The tablet, dating to about 670 BC, is a treaty […]
Sushi superpowers.
New Scientist hypes a pretty cool discovery about gene-swapping bacteria changing sushi-eaters’ digestion: Genes regularly shuttle between different bacteria, offering each other new traits such […]
SONG: Aquarium (penitential Robyn Hitchcock cover)
SONG: “Aquarium” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. Originally by Robyn Hitchcock. SOURCE: This is a penitential cover. There’s no specific scientific […]
Science Art: Colour Wheel by Moses Harris, c.1770
Click to embiggen Moses Harris was an entomologist in Britain at about the time the American colonies started that unpleasantness with tea stamps and flintlock […]
“WHAT did you just pick up?”
BBC shares the cute story of the discovery of what could be our greatest grandparents, the oldest members of the genus Homo: The site was […]
Friendlier dragons.
Explorers in the Philippines have, New Scientist reports, just discovered a cousin of the fearsome Komodo dragon that eats fruit: Measuring 2 metres long, Varanus […]
Lizard-brain learning.
Science Daily gets primitive with research into how the oldest parts of our brains help us learn: Many of the mundane skills that we apply […]
Breasts save lives. And money.
No, really. The IT Wire covers a new Pediatrics study that breastfeeding could save 911 lives and billions of dollars annually: …[T]he paper in the […]
Comets made us icy.
Telegraph.co.uk reports on a new theory that hail from a comet’s tail caused a 1,000-year freeze: Thousands of chunks of material from the comet would […]
Science Art: Cist of a Child Found at the Gates of Athens, by P. Broux
Click to embiggen I found this on the wonderful Old Book Illustrations blog. It’s from Les merveilles de l’industrie (The wonders of industry), an 1871 […]
Tiny cube tidies orbit.
BBC reports on a new invention – a cube that releases a sheet of plastic to clean up space junk: Residual air molecules still present […]
Magnets and morality
Medical News Today makes me feel uncomfortable… oh, no, wait, it’s a GOOD thing!… about the way magnets can alter our moral judgement: Ten years […]