Rainy weekends are all our fault.
New Scientist adds insult to injury by telling us that not only does it really rain more often on our days off, but that our […]
Science 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 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 moreBaby Talk 101.
Keep it simple, short and repetitive! That’s what an international team of neurological researchers covered in PhysOrg.com found when they scanned infants’ brains while saying, […]
Morphine plus pot equals, like, no pain, man.
From the trenches of the War on Drugs comes a New Scientist pharmaceutical report that’s bound to have doctors and pain patients alike going “Duuuude.” […]
Science Art: Honey Ant, Webster’s New International
Does anyone else remember these from Insects Do The Strangest Things? Oh, what a fine children’s book that is. From Webster’s New International Dictionary of […]
The iPhone girl.
This isn’t research as much as social observation, but have you heard about the iPhone girl? I noticed her story on reddit but she’s popping […]
The keen migratory instincts of cows.
It seems like this story hit everywhere at once, but it’s still marvelous. Here’s the BBC version of how cows always face north: Images from […]
Unplugged.
So, the BBC is talking about one of Nikola Tesla’s dreams (he of the AC current and the plasma ball) coming true in an Intel […]
Hello, Poindexter.
You may or may not have noticed a new link in the “fellow travellers” area down there on the right. It’s to Hello, Poindexter!, the […]
Science Art: Red Dwarf Flare
Click to embiggen vastly From the NASA Image Galleries: On April 25, 2008, NASA’s Swift satellite picked up a record-setting flare from a star known […]
SONG: When the Lights Go Out.
SONG: “When the Lights Go Out.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: “Sleep-deprived brains alternate between normal activity and ‘power failure’”, […]
Bad choices and birth control.
LiveScience makes clear that sometimes, contraception isn’t the best decision. Or, well, doesn’t help you make the best decisions… because birth control pills befuddle women’s […]
The plausibly deniable death ray.
The great thing about laser weapons, New Scientist says, isn’t just that you can fry your enemy from miles away. You can also shrug your […]
*More* spouses?
New Scientist has just given me stress-induced palpitations with their finding that the more wives, the longer-lived the man: After accounting for socioeconomic differences, men […]
Vegetarian spiders. Like panthers.
Bug-watchers at the 12th International Behavioral Ecology Congress have brought the world’s attention (and the attention of the fine bloggers at Greenupgrader.com) to a previously […]
Better than Shinola.
Dailytech.com is smiling (or is it just gas?) over the latest trick we’ve gotten E. coli to perform. Geneticists have altered the food-poisoning germ so […]