Wolfe on the Space Race
That fella who wrote The Right Stuff got into the New York Times this week and allowed to do a little ranting about the big […]
Science 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 moreScience Art: Mirounga leonina 01, by H. Zell
This is a southern elephant seal, the largest marine mammal that isn’t a whale. They’re about twice as weighty …
Read more… and Jupiter, while we’re at it.
An Australian amateur astronomer named Bird (or, IRL, Anthony Wesley) just spotted something slamming into Jupiter – a collision that’s been confirmed by the big […]
Bomb the moon.
Yeah, we’re gonna do it. Stupid moon, all smug and silvery and sneaky, looking down at us all night long. Scientific American’s right. We don’t […]
Science Art: Prachtkäfer aus der Grube Messel (Splendor Beetle of the Messel Pit)
Click to embiggen vastly This is a fossilized insect, one of the Buprestidae (or Splendor Beetles or Jewel Beetles, from the collection of the Hessisches […]
Feeling vague?
Don’t let this happen to you.
Big fish! Hungry fish!
You may have heard of the giant prehistoric shark called megalodon. And maybe other megafauna, like Megalosaurus or even the mighty mechanical Megasaurus. But LiveScience […]
Send Your Name To Mars!
It’s free! You can get your name on a microchip placed aboard the next Mars Rover, just by filling in this form here! It may […]
If salamanders can do it…
Reuters recently brought up some research into how salamanders do that whole regenerating limbs thing: In salamanders, the blood vessels contract quickly and limit bleeding […]
Living large.
New Yorker valiantly tries to explain – scientifically – why it is that Americans (and the rest of the Western World) are getting so darned […]
Loonier than Luna.
The archives of Space.com have produced an old but strikingly weird story about a strikingly weird discovery – a second moon orbiting invisibly around Earth: […]
Science Art: Aphis Wolf, from Webster’s New International
This is the aphis wolf, or aphid lion, or, in other words, either the larva of the much less-threateningly named ladybug or lacewing. This particular […]
Listen to the lituus.
About two months ago, the BBC tells us, Scottish researchers used computer models to bring a lost medieval instrument back to life: Bach’s motet (a […]
Vatican funds stem-cell research.
The Australian Associated Press reports on a new move from the Catholic Church, which is offering a $100,000 research grant for work on adult stem […]
We’ll go a-waltzing….
Australian researchers have just discovered a trio of never-before-seen dinosaurs in the Winton Formation. Two of them died at the bottom of one of those […]
Cave man boogie.
The New York Times reports on a German discovery – or, really, a whole set of discoveries – of Stone Age tools, sculptures and the […]