A Cowardly and Superstitious Lot.
I can’t say anything more about SciAm’s interview on the science of Batman. The article speaks for itself: What’s a realistic training regimen? I didn’t […]
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 moreScience Art: Butterfly Tongue
Click to embiggen vastly Is it smiling at you? From Louisa Howard at the Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility.
Anti-evolutionary Bayou Seeping Into US Politics.
So New Scientist tells us that the forces that believe God made Man (but a monkey never provided the glue) are celebrating an Intelligent Design […]
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 […]
Beijing 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.