Psychedelic Paintball
Wired‘s “Danger Room” reports on like, wow, man, that’s one *TRIPPY* gun: Paintballs laced with mind-altering drugs and drug-spraying robots sound like something for The […]
Science Art: Figs. 1315-1333 (Various rotary piston engines), 1890.
This is a page of figures from (deep breath) The engineer’s sketch-book of mechanical movements, devices, appli…
Read moreScience 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 moreT. rex could have caught us.
New Scientist strikes fear into the hearts of time travelers everywhere with a report that T. rex could have caught humans. Easily. Which is kind […]
Science Art: Compact Muon Solenoid of the Large Hadron Collider
This is how CERN is hoping to find the Higgs Boson. At 40 feet long, it is the biggest superconducting solenoid ever made, costing $65 […]
You’ll put an eye out.
Behold the science of engineering. LEGO engineering.
Giant “living fossil” fish on the brink
National Geographic reports on another Chinese river-dweller struggling to survive – the giant sturgeon, also known as the “underwater panda”: Adult sturgeons, which can measure […]
SONG: Beautiful (Have Another Plum)
SONG: “Beautiful (Have Another Plum)” (To download: right-click & “Save As”) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: “Baboon Birth Control” entry, from “Primates on the Pill”, New Scientist, […]
Mira, The Tail Star
We’ve been watching this thing for four centuries, and we only now noticed it had a tail, as Nature reports. A really long tail: Astronomers […]
Baby powder soothes earthquakes
Nature eases chafing on a tectonic level: Researchers drilling deep into the San Andreas fault in California report in today’s Nature the presence of talc […]
Science Art: William Herschel Telescope
from Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, La Palma, Picture Archives, (via Barbelith).
Speed of Light: BROKEN (in a teeny-tiny way)
Researchers Gunter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen of the University of Koblenz have told New Scientist (and other sources) that they’ve broken the light barrier, sending […]
Smoke ’em while the voices tell you it’s OK.
There’s been some press lately about studies that show a correlation between marijuana smoking and psychosis – as in, smoke dope, increase your risk of […]
The knee bone’s connected to the… pancreas bone?
PhysOrg blows our minds with the discovery that our skeletons are actually endocrine glands: Karsenty and his colleagues had previously shown that leptin, a hormone […]
Science Art: Romanae archetypae tabulae anatomicae novis…
Romanae archetypae tabulae anatomicae novis… is a 1783 edition of a book of anatomical poses written by Bartolomeo Eustachi and illustrated by Giulio de’Musi in […]
Perseids + New Moon =
Go outside tomorrow night and look up. Look up! Keep looking up! Trust us on this one.
Ancient germs reborn
From New Scientist comes a fun story about prehistoric bacteria being brought back to life by meddling scientists: Kay Bidle of Rutgers University in New […]