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: Mirounga leonina 01, by H. Zell
This is a southern elephant seal, the largest marine mammal that isn’t a whale. They’re about twice as weighty …
Read moreScience 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: 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 […]
Winds of War
UN Scientists looking at the weather have found that over the past 500 years, climate change has marched hand in hand with war, New Scientist […]
SONG: Across the Night
SONG: “Across the Night” (To download: right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. Yes, me again. SOURCE: The post “Virtual Mars mission – 500 days in […]
Unexpected dinosaurs.
Despite being dead for, oh, 65 million years or so, dinosaurs still turn up in the darnedest places. Mainly museums, of course, but even there, […]
Another dolphin nears extinction.
That’s the not-terribly cheerful news from Nature on the vaquita (Phocoena sinus), a porpoise from Mexico’s Pacific coast: In 1999, researchers estimated there were 567 […]
Science Art: Fächertextur
Polarization-microscope image of C-Phase liquid crystal, taken by Wikimedia Commons user "Minutemen."
Samuel Hoffman plays Big Band… on the Theremin
BECAUSE YOU ASKED FOR IT… Big band theremin. So soothing. So Golden Age of Radio. So heady with nostalgia and ether.
Gnarls Barkley on the Moog Etherwave Theremin.
I hope you’re enjoying your Thanksgiving, American readers. From the description of the video on YouTube: The main theremin was passed through iZotope Trash, an […]
Dvorak on the Matryomin.
In America, the Thanksgiving holiday starts today (more or less). To celebrate, The Guild of Scientific Troubadours will be reveling in the gorgeous sounds of […]
Surfer creates Theory of Everything.
If Einstein was around today, he’d probably surf, too. There’s a piece in the Telegraph (based, apparently, on a New Scientist clip) about Dr. A. […]
Roll out the solar!
Popular Science has named the nanosolar powersheet the “Best of What’s New 2007,” and for good reason. Instead of using big glass frames to generate […]