Nanotube Trouble.
Rice University researchers – some of the pioneers of nanotechnology – have declared that carbon nanotubes may be… may be… as dangerous as asbestos: …[T]he […]
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 moreDon’t Tell Me You Love Me.
Scientific American ruins my naive illusions about love with their expose of the orgasmic mind: Neuroscientist Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen in the […]
My Sister, My Stomach.
Well. LiveScience shares the news of a 9-year-old girl in Greece discovering that she actually had a twin sister… growing inside her stomach: “They could […]
Science Art: “Acherontia atropos,” Nordisk familjebok
The Death’s Head Hawkmoth. There’s a more recent photograph of one here; the first time I remember learning this beauty’s name was in a brilliantly […]
The Sanity-Shattering Glass Armonica.
They say this instrument will drive listeners insane. Insane with beauty, say I. It creates the most haunting tones ever heard. Invented by Ben Franklin, […]
The Little Green Men and the Heavenly Host.
New Scientist reports on the Vatican’s public acceptance of extraterrestrial life: In the interview, headlined “The extraterrestrial is my brother,” [Reverend Jose Gabriel Funes, head […]
California’s Fast Future.
They’re one step closer to Burbank to San Francisco in less than 3 hours. Besides being fast, high-speed rail’s other touted benefits do sound pretty […]
Seismologists, look to the skies.
What with earthquakes being in the news recently, it might be reassuring to look at a recent New Scientist piece on a potential early warning […]
A Southern Man Don’t Need This Spider Around.
The CBC reports on a newly discovered trapdoor spider named for Mr. Neil Young: East Carolina University biologist Jason Bond calls the new species Myrmekiaphila […]
Science Art: Sixteen Black Dot Tentacles by Ernst Haeckel
Sixteen Black Dot Tentacles by Ernst Haeckel. This may look like an abstract or a mathematical exercise; it’s not. It’s an illustration of a microscopic […]
Space Boomerang: A Slight Return.
You really wanted to see it come back, didn’t you. I sure did….
Brilliant Morning Coffee
You already knew this, but the BBC Science Desk reiterates that caffeine really is brain food: “Caffeine appears to block several of the disruptive effects […]
BREAKING: The Platypus is Weird.
New Scientist leaves us in no doubt: the platypus is not like other animals. Wesley Warren at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, led the […]
Global Warming and DDT
New Scientist reveals an ugly, new problem from melting glaciers. They’re dosing penguins with DDT… and us with a whole bunch of other bygone pollutants: […]
Grim Aurora: Earth’s Magnetic Field and Suicide.
New Scientist brings up the odd notion that our planet might be using invisible forces against us, with the recent discovery that geomagnetism triggers suicides: […]