Oxytocin and roses….
New Scientist recently got all romantic with an intrepid researcher’s chemical expose of her big fat geek wedding: WE’D booked the venue, chosen the bridesmaids’ […]
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: “Rocket Ride Is New Planetarium Exhibit,” Popular Science Monthly, April 1938
Click to embiggen slightly Hey, look! PopSci just put 137 years of back issues on the internet for free. Science-aesthetic treasure! They’re at Google Books, […]
Evolution made us conservative, not smart.
LabSpaces shares some interesting research on the role of novelty in human development: An earlier study by Kanazawa found that more intelligent individuals were more […]
Beethoven isn’t Beethoven any more.
Slate has a great piece on why the piano we hear now ain’t the instrument great composers wrote on – and how that changes the […]
Snake eating dinosaurs.
Not dinosaurs that eat snakes, Wired says, but snakes that paleontologists discovered eating dinosaurs: But in 2001, University of Michigan paleontologist Jeff Wilson, took a […]
Plasma drive’s silver lining.
AFP takes a sunnier look at NASA’s budget trimming. Sure, the government agency said they won’t be landing people on the moon or Mars any […]
Cute little dinosaurs.
Discovery News has the sweetest report on tiny pterosaurs flitting about with songbirds: “I think that a group of small pterosaurs was feeding together near […]
Science Art: Nikola Tesla’s Letterhead
If you’re one of history’s greatest electrical inventors, it is only suitable to have stationery that’s equal to your stature. The central image is of […]
The wise nap.
UC Berkley has me hankering for some shut-eye… for my brain’s sake: In the recent UC Berkeley sleep study, 39 healthy young adults were divided […]
Life is dangerous.
NPR has introduced me to the Medea Principle; just as the Gaia Principle states that a planet can be thought of as a single living […]
SONG: Staring
SONG: “Staring” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: “Body of Sea Urchin is One Big Eye,” LiveScience , 28 Dec 2009, […]
Hypno-Soup!
The Wall Street Journal reveals the lengths to which modern corporations go to make hot soup seem even homier: Campbell began dissecting its condensed-soup marketing […]
Science Art: Gingko bilobe, Dictionnaire encyclopédique Trousset, 1886 – 1891
This is the plant that produces those memory-enhancing extracts you see in the health food aisle of the drug store – the one that long-lived […]
Eldest alphabet.
New Scientist takes a closer look at the squiggly bits around some famous cave paintings – shapes that might just be some of the world’s […]
Mosquito nose transplants.
So Science Daily says – and they don’t seem to be making this up – that scientists are stopping malaria by transplanting mosquitoes’ noses into […]