Keeping the “C” in OLPC.
The BBC has a field report on the XO, the laptop distributed by the One Laptop Per Child project. It’s a field report by one […]
Science 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…
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 moreEndangered words.
Natural History magazine sounds a warning for words. University of Michigan linguist Sarah Grey Thomason, a specialist in the Salish–Pend d’Oreille language of Montana’s Native […]
Dinosaur meat.
Palaeontologists in North Dakota have found a first-of-a-kind duck-billed dinosaur fossil, the BBC reports, containing not just hadrosaur bones, but the remains of skin, ligaments […]
One chimp, two chimp.
Science Daily continues to make me feel inadequate by pointing out that even chimpanzees are better at math: “There are still many people, including many […]
Science Art: Rust and Dirt
No, this isn’t an orbital photo of Mars or a microscopic image of crystallography. It’s a photo of good old iron oxide, taken by Roger […]
Etienne-Jules Marey, Fusil Photographique
Picture borrowed from the Étienne-Jules Marey biography in the Hargrave Aviation History pages. In the 1800s, Étienne-Jules Marey made a name for himself studying human […]
Babies know who’s helpful.
New Scientist reports on the wisdom of babes. Six-month-olds are able to recognize who’s really on their side and who’s trying to do them wrong, […]
Making a brain.
For a few years now, computer engineers have been building a virtual brain – using computers to replicate every neural connection in a mammal’s gray […]
Invisible? Or just empty?
Nature recently revealed research that will please the nihilists among us, from astrophysicist Teppo Mattsson, who says that dark energy, the stuff that keeps the […]
Robot Guitar.
I’m not sure if this takes the fun out of weird intonations and un-well-temperedness, but Gibson is now selling an amazing guitar that Is. A. […]
Science wants to be free…
…even when taught online by some of the world’s top universities. Maybe I can finally get chemistry to make sense.
Dry tobacco.
Nature reports on a new strain of genetically modified drought-resistant tobacco. OK, so some people are probably thinking this sounds like the least healthy plant […]
Science Art: Snow crystals 2b
Hexagonal dendrite snowflake as captured by the Electron Microscopy Unit of the USDA Beltsville Agricultural Research Center.
Goodbye, alien neighbors.
Nature makes us feel lonely. It turns out that Gliese 580c isn’t that likely to have life on it after all. The most Earth-like planet […]
Sunny smiles…
…from a solar-powered toothbrush, of course. The invention, from University of Saskatchewan professor Kunio Komiyama and his colleague Dr. Gerry Uswak, uses electrons to replace […]