Coconut fusion reactor.
New Scientist goes tropical, revealing what a fusion reactor has in common with a pina colada: The coconuts will be used to generate 10,000 cubic […]
SONG: Your Catalogue
SONG: “Your Catalogue”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: NBC News, “New wild cat species is ide…
Read moreScience Art: Beebe's Bathysphäre, 1934
This is an image of William Beebe’s bathysphere, as placed on Wikimedia Commons by ETH Bibliothek. It was creat…
Read moreScience Art: Power of RCA Electron Microscope, May 1955
These are diatoms, I think, seen by two different microscopes.
As the caption from Popular Electronics says…
Read moreScience Art: Red Pepper, 1910.
Red pepper (Cayenne pepper) will cure almost any case of la grippe within 24 hours, or so they say. At least no…
Read moreScience Art: Figs. 1315-1333 (Various rotary piston engines), 1890.
This is a page of figures from (deep breath) The engineer’s sketch-book of mechanical movements, devices, appli…
Read more“YOU PUT IN OTHER DETAILS.”
This is why we do what we do: Letter to a ^top scientist at Woomera. This is how the space race was won, you know. […]
Every circle is alive.
This sounds awfully New Agey for Yale, but apparently, physicists there have discovered that metal circles have a tiny amount of persistent energy flowing through […]
The Gold Bug
EurekAlert tells me these dudes in Australia are breeding their fortunes after finding a germ that, in effect, lays golden eggs: “A number of years […]
Squirt memory up your nose.
The venerable Lockergnome recently looked at memory technology – specifically, a nasal spray that boosts your ability to learn: In a research report featured as […]
Science Art: Phallus drewesii, by Brian Perry.
Click to embiggen vastly There’s been a bit of news recently about the discovery of a large number of glowing mushroom species in various corners […]
The Eigenharp
So, these musical engineers are trying to take the keyboards out of electronic music. Instead, “beautiful wooden instruments” are back with the Eigenharp: It pitchbends, […]
Tomorrow! Watch the moon EXPLODE!
NASA has given us a helpful guide for watching the LCROSS probe slam into the surface of the moon tomorrow: Put on your hard hat […]
Intelligent eyes.
IEEE Spectrum, the journal that sounds like it’s screaming, is taking a long, close look at contact lenses that could give you Terminator eyes: …[I]n […]
Salt, paper, battery!
The technical chefs at M.I.T. have come up with a cheap, fun recipe – with simple ingredients like salt and paper, you can start cooking […]
Plasma drive. We have one.
Or, really astronaut hero Franklin Chang-Diaz has one. Seed magazine has an interview with Dr. Chang-Diaz in which he describes how he’s using magnets and […]
Science Art: Colorful Stars Galore Inside Globular Star Cluster Omega Centauri
Click to embiggen This is what 100,000 stars look like. They’re just a fraction of the 10 million stars in the massive globular cluster Omega […]
“The brain has its own language.”
Yes. Thanks, Jim, for introducing me to Nature’s Great Beyond blog, and especially the “Songs about Science” feature. And this: Carl Sagan (autotuned), with Stephen […]
GeekPop: Call for Artists
I am not alone. No, there’s a whole festival for people like me. And, possibly, like you, too. GeekPop 2009 is accepting applications for performers. […]
Another Yangzi casualty.
The BBC depresses me again with a story about a unique Chinese fish that’s probably already extinct: A number of fish species vie for the […]