No song today…
Between playing on Wednesday and moving into a new house, there hasn’t been any time for writing and recording – so the 23rd will go […]
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 moreSperm of a feather…
NPR takes a look at the scrum that happens when sperm team up to reach their ultimate goal: Fisher wondered whether sperm from two different […]
Substitute blood.
Perfect for androids or pacifist vampires… maybe. But Science Daily says artificial blood could save plenty of ordinary human lives: The reason for this failure, […]
Open Dinosaurs.
You, yes YOU, dear reader, can be published as a paleontologist. That’s what Discovery News says about the Open Dinosaur Project, which is looking for […]
Tying light in knots
Science Daily bends my head with their report on scientists who’ve tied lasers into knots: Optical vortices can be created with holograms which direct the […]
God, meet God… and this is God.
This is not new science, but it’s certainly new to me. Over at the Mad Science Experiments site, there’s an article describing the meeting between […]
Science Art: The U.S.S. Los Angeles moored on the U.S.S. Pakota, 1924
Click to embiggen. This is the US Navy’s airship Los Angeles, the most successful of America’s rigid-body airships, engaging in a maneuver that proved dirigibles […]
The “look at me” hormone.
SciAm bursts the myth that testosterone is the source of male aggression. No, the truth is far worse. It’s the thing that turns men into […]
Wetware upgrade.
BBC dives into the future of computing, when we replace cold, hard silicon with a strong brew of liquid thinking machines: What distinguishes the current […]
Nuclear molemen?
Sorry, but I just can’t outdo Wired’s headline on this one: Pentagon Scientists Target Iran’s Nuclear Molemen: Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, apparently takes a personal […]
Chinese science.
Jonathan D. Moreno, writing in the Science Progress blog, takes note of the latest signs of the new Eastern superpower’s growth. China’s not just an […]
A tiny Golden Mean.
Science Daily looks at the hidden symmetry lying inside all things where we can’t see it: Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie […]
Science Art: Cormorant, by Bob Hines.
These are cormorants – the birds that swim underwater to catch fish. I fell in love with cormorants reading Ping as a little boy (on […]
Science Art: “A Pigeon Fancier’s Manual,” by Ruth Padel.
I found this poem among three books of scientific poetry reviewed in Science Magazine, 2 October 2009. It’s from Darwin: A Life in Poems by […]
Ancient Amazonian society revealed.
National Geographic really does specialize in that whole lost jungle city thing, doesn’t it? And it’s so nice when they actually deliver faint traces of […]