Bad Astronomer’s Top 10
The so-called Bad Astronomer picked the top 10 astronomy pictures of 2007. Go and see them. They’re beautiful.
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 more
SONG: Jaekelopterus!
SONG: “Jaekelopterus!” (To download: right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. Dui, shi wo. (Oui, c’est moi.) SOURCE: ““Giant Claw Points to Monster Sea Scorpion”, New […]
Science Art: The Helix Nebula
At the very center of this giant, staring eye is a white dwarf star. It’s located about 700 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius. The […]
The Pale Blue Dot
Found via Barbelith. More on the film is available at palebluefilms.com. Good Yule, fellow dot-fractions. Stay warm during this longest night.
Raising Stonehenge: The Power of Pebbles & Sticks.
This is my favorite kind of science – a guy figuring out things in his back yard. Retired construction worker W.T. “Wally” Wallington thinks he’s […]
Power from space.
It’s nice to see this idea is still being kicked around – and taken more seriously now that oil prices are rising so dramatically. It […]
One word: Plastics.
PopSci reports on why one man thinks the petroleum industry wants him dead. Frank Pringle has figured out a way to turn plastics back into […]
Go well, Voyager.
Welcome to interstellar space. Nature reports that Voyager 2 has left the solar system. And, as NASA emphasizes, it did so while discovering our solar […]
Be nice. It’s in your DNA.
Israeli researchers believe they’ve found a genetic basis for generosity, according to PhysOrg.com: Through an online task involving making a choice whether or not to […]
Science art: Hazardous, by Jean Lapointe
Click for larger image Submitted by Jean Lapointe to the annual micrography contest of the International Conference on Electron, Ion, and Photon Beam Technology and […]
The Thummer
Video game controllers are compact and efficient little things (although I always find the button-heavy X-box ones a little confusing to use). They’re also the […]
Zombie roaches.
National Geographic reveals how parasitic wasps transform cockroaches into
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 […]
Endangered 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 […]