PENGUIN: ACQUIRED.
Technology Review closes in on an interesting application for spooky biometric computer systems – using Big Brother security software to identify penguins: The software involved–originally […]
SONG: Sleeping Cathedrals
SONG: “Sleeping Cathedrals”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “World’s biggest whale g…
Read moreScience Art: Build Your Own Lie Detector, 1955
This is the opener for an article in the May 1955 issue of Popular Electronics. You can read the article here, …
Read moreScience Art: Collops bipunctatus, U, Back, SD, Pennington County, 2013
This image of a Collops bipunctatus, a beetle from the Melyridae family, was taken by Sam Droege from flowers …
Read moreScience Art: Histologist Microscope, 1900
An illustration of an elegant optical device from Science Gossip magazine (a publication which I discovered via…
Read moreScience Art: Rudimentary Simulator, 1963.
This is Figure 3 from “Man-Machine System Simulation for Flight Vehicles” by Steven Belsley, an article which w…
Read moreScience Art: Astrapia Splendidissima, 1895
This is the first illustration in the article “A New Bird of Paradise” by the Hon. Walter Rothschild, published…
Read moreBeijing 2008: Robot drones and Segway police.
Guests at the Summer Olympics might get an idea of what “technological superiority” means nowadays, according to AP’s report on China’s new security measures. The […]
Worms. Inside you. Making you better.
That’s the big idea behind this New York Times piece about the doctor who gave himself hookworms to see if they’d cure his allergies: He […]
Music’s in the genes.
Scientific American presents a scathing indictment of my forebears as it reveals a link between genetics and musicality: In what the researchers called the first […]
Science Art: Saturn’s Aurora
Click to embiggen An ultraviolet image of Saturn taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the vast, violent, invisible auroras around the huge planet’s poles. […]
Fireworks.
Or the next best thing: New Scientist’s gallery of supernova remnants. Here’s the most recent photo: Click to embiggen; photo credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team This […]
Mushrooms and meaning.
Johns Hopkins researchers are getting profoundly trippy, PhysOrg reports, in a research project that found psychedelic mushrooms can have long-lasting spiritual effects: “Most of the […]
Whistles of death and healing.
Wired takes a musical trip to ancient Mexico, with the help of an engineer who has recreated the sounds of the Aztecs and Mayans and […]
Too clean for comfort (or “We’re composed of membranes too.”).
Nature recently published a story that should shock the clean freaks among us. Researchers have found that common disinfectants lower fertility and cause birth defects […]
Four-legged Fish.
It walks! It has gills, but by goodness it WALKS! The BBC isn’t quite so enthusiastic in describing the discovery of a four-legged fish fossil: […]
Science Art: Coelastrum by Andrews
Simon Andrews took this microscopic photograph of a cell cluster of coelastrum algae and submitted it to Wikimedia Commons, where I found it.
Brief: Phoenix on Twitter
How much am I loving the Mars Phoenix tweets? Very much.
Meditation, Mindfulness and “Untraining” the Brain.
ScienceBlogs has (have?) a piece on an interesting study about ways to make your thinking less hidebound and more creative: Yet relatively few studies focus […]
Spray-on skin.
PopSci‘s got skin in a can. I mean it. An aerosol. You spray it on burns. It’s skin in a can: Within the next five […]
Neanderthals About Town.
PhysOrg.com puts on the Ritz with a new discovery about the sophisticated Neanderthals of Great Britain: “The tools we’ve found at the site are technologically […]