AI is reading scrolls burned in Vesuvius.
The Guardian looks back at a carbonized papyrus scorched by the lava that consumed Pompeii. University of Kentucky computer scientists have been able to decipher […]
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 moreScience Art: Power of RCA Electron Microscope, May 1955
These are diatoms, I think, seen by two different microscopes.
As the caption from Popular Electronics says…
Read moreScience Art: Red Pepper, 1910.
Red pepper (Cayenne pepper) will cure almost any case of la grippe within 24 hours, or so they say. At least no…
Read moreScience 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 moreExercise scientists: women hunted, men gathered
Scientific American upends the old idea that manly men evolved to hunt for meat for growing prehistoric families with physiological evidence that women – who […]
Robot warships hitting targets in the open sea.
Popular Science reported on “ghost ships,” a.k.a. USVs (Unmanned Sea Vehicles), passing their latest targeting tests on maneuvers in the Middle East: The tests, dubbed […]
Science Art: Diagram illustrating the inherent conspicuousness of an eye-spot…, Cott, 1942.
An illustration showing how noticeable an eye actually is, from the text The Vertebrate Eye and Its Adaptive Radiation, which looks at eyes, eyes everywhere, […]
SONG: “Communications” (a penitential Slim Gaillard cover)
SONG: “Communications” (a penitential Slim Gaillard cover). (available as .ogg here) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: This isn’t based on any research. It’s a cover of a […]
Science Art: Altitude and azimuth instrument, 1876.
How high? This device will tell you. It’s from The great Centennial exhibition critically described and illustrated, by Phillip T. Sandhurst, which you can read […]
Roman glass became photonic crystal
Physics Magazine joins Tufts University researcher Giulia Guidetti who has studied a glass shard that was broken and buried shortly after 100 B.C.E. that over […]
Science Art: Sea Sirens, by A.A. Jansson, 1930.
“The efforts made by oversober scientists to reduce such marvels to coldly reasonable origins have in a few specific cases been only too successful,” wrote […]
Stone Age flip-flops
PhysOrg reports on Witwatersrand researchers who’ve found tracks left by prehistoric footwear – a pair of flip-flop sandals that go back at least 75,000 years, […]
Neolithic engineers
The Guardian visits a huge, 5,000-year-old tomb complex on Scotland’s Orkney Isles that reveals a surprisingly sophisticated level of engineering know-how: The tomb measures more […]
Fossil antibiotics
Stat covers a medicine-making strategy right out of Jurassic Park, with a UPenn researcher named Cesar de la Fuente, who is looking for protein-chains called […]
No song today
Once again, have a full instrumental track and melody, even, but the lyrics are not there. I now owe either two or three covers. One […]
Science Art: 821393 – Flying Machine – Wright Brothers, May 22, 1906.
It’s an airplane. Maybe the airplane. And this is how it looked when the U.S. Patent Office made it official. I found the illustration on […]
Hit the snooze button; your brain will thank you.
BBC’s Science Focus recommends indulging in another few minutes of shut-eye, because Swedish research shows hitting the snooze button on your morning alarm can boost […]