Science Art: Check Valve, 1882.
A valve to prevent backflow… so the river doesn’t wind up in the reservoir, or the effluent in the shower pipes. From A practical treatise […]
Science 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 moreScience Art: What can make any tape recorder sound a little more like an Ampex?, 1963.
This is an ad for Ampex tape from the August 1963 edition of Electronics Australia, a magazine (which I found o…
Read moreScience Art: Cygnus region in emission lines, 2025
This is a photo of space with a bit of color amplification so we can tell what we’re looking at. Nebulas on the…
Read moreScience Art: Heart apical two-chamber view myocardial regions, by Patrick Lynch
This is an illustration of a particular perspective in a cardiac echocardiogram. An “apical view” is one of the…
Read moreSONG: Sleeping Cathedrals
SONG: “Sleeping Cathedrals”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “World’s biggest whale g…
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Ancient stash of hallucinogenic medicine discovered.
Science magazine reports on the Dutch discovery of, basically, Roman-era drugs hidden inside a hollow bone. The black henbane seeds could have been used to […]
How the Bigfoot candidate went extinct.
Triops Galaxy reports on paleontological research into the biggest primate ever to walk the planet, the 600-pound Gigantopithecus blackii… without mentioning Bigfoot. Instead, they focus […]
Science Art: Fluorescence and birefringence of 445 nm blue laser in calcite crystal, Jan Pavelka, 2011.
Calcite refracts light in a linear way – it’s why (as previous songs have discussed) it may have been used as a navigational tool by […]
“MouthPad” lets you scroll with your tongue.
NBC reports on a digital device that’s just on the tip of your tongue… where it acts like a trackpad on the roof of your […]
AI stocks take a dive.
The Futurist calls the latest wave of the hype-cycle over for artificial intelligence, with news of AI companies losing an impressive $190 billion in stock […]
Secretly sick.
University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Reporting and Policy (CIDRAP) has some scientific findings from colleagues at U Michigan that will surprise no one […]
Science Art: Nyctodactlyus, by F. John, c. 1915
This glimpse into a prehistoric world (which we now know should probably have at least a few more feathers in it) is part of the […]
Hacking the train.
Ars Technica recently reported on a new front in the “right to repair” war. A group of hackers broke into a Polish train system in […]
No song for January
I am currently unable to record, or at least to play a guitar. Song will appear shortly.
Science Art: He2-104: The Southern Crab Nebula, 1999.
This is a nebula inside a nebula, caused by two stars pulling each other apart, as photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. From the description […]
Locusts raised in a centrifuge have stronger skeletons.
Science Magazine gets heavy with insects that, when brought up in the “hypergravity” of a spinning centrifuge, grow stronger exoskeletons as a result: When a […]
A magnetic galactic map in three dimensions.
The University of Tokyo might have solved some riddles about the formation of stars by creating the world’s first 3D map of the galaxy’s own […]
A white-blood-cell genetic therapy can cure lupus.
The American College of Rheumatology publishes a study about a new way to treat a famously slippery autoimmune disease, using CAR-T therapy to successfully put […]
Science Art: Mouchot’s solar thermal collector from 1860, from Nordisk Familjebok, 1917.
This is a solar-powered generator. A funnel with sides angled at 90 degrees is pointed at the sun to catch its radiation, and those rays […]