Here’s a Mars habitat, ready for a year’s occupancy.
PhysOrg reports on NASA’s Mars Dune Alpha, a 3D-printed home for researchers ready to spend a year simulating a mission on Mars: The facility, created […]
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 moreThe last leg of the longest butterfly migration has been mapped at last.
Science News brings tidings from Central Africa, where painted lady butterflies born in Europe spend their winters in the longest migration of any butterfly: Pinpointing […]
Science Art: Male Wood Duck, by Abbott H. Thayer, 1904.
This is half of one color plate from a book intended to show how “showy” coloration can actually make some creatures harder to spot in […]
Baseball hitters are getting more home runs, thanks to climate change.
Science reports on some unexpected consequences of a slightly warmer planet. In the statistics-heavy game of baseball, hitters have been averaging more home runs than […]
Not that you’d want to kiss them, but T. rex actually had lips.
AP News reports on research into the fearful mouth of the scariest of flesh-eating dinosaurs which found that – despite the public image of Tyrannosaurus […]
Any hormonal birth control increases your breast cancer risk.
The University of Oxford has unfortunate news for anyone on the pill, or implant, or hormone-releasing IUDs. A new anaysis from the Oxford Population Health’s […]
Science Art: Loess Sediments Thickness, by Przemysław Mroczek, 2020.
This map shows where silt was laid down untold ages ago. According to its brief description on Wikimedia Commons, it depicts: Loess sediments distribution and […]
Elemental music from a spectroscope.
Ars Technica digs the research of Indiana University grad student W. Walker Smith, who has combined his interests in music and chemistry to create a […]
Science Art: Crew-5’s Nighttime Splashdown, by NASA/Keegan Barber, 2023
SpaceX Dragon Endurance returns to Earth on the night of March 11, 2023. Specifically, it’s just after 9:00 p.m. in the waters off Tampa, Florida. […]
Americans die young – and are dying younger than ever, compared to the rest of the world.
NPR looks at a subtle, slow-motion health crisis facing America. Compared to every other industrialized nation, across every age group, Americans die younger … and […]
SONG: “Giant Isopods Have Stolen My Gameboy” (a penitential Werk cover)
SONG: “Giant Isopods Have Stolen My Gameboy”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: This has no source in scientific research; it’s a penitential cover of a song by […]
SONG: The Elephant
SONG: “The Elephant”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: BBC 28 Feb 2023, “Kerala: India temple replaces elephant with robot for rituals,” as used in the post “Kerala […]
Kids of same-sex parents are… pretty normal, according to an international study.
The Guardian reports on a geographically broad study – a study of studies from many different countries – that looked at same-sex couples and found […]
Nature‘s endorsement didn’t help Biden – it only hurt Nature (and scientists in general).
Nature honestly (and slightly brutally) examines its own shortcomings as a political advocate in a study that found the scientific journal’s 2020 endorsement of Joe […]
Science Art: A Fossil Flower (Cycadeoidea ingens), 1924.
This is a photograph of a model from the Field Museum of Natural History, representing a cycad flower reconstructed from a fossil. The fossil came […]