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 […]
Science Art: Psyche Spacecraft at the Asteroid Psyche, 2026
From the NASA Scientific Visualization Studio:
Read moreThis illustration depicts NASA’s Psyche spacecraft. Launched…
Science Art: Body-centered cubic (bcc) unit cell of iron, 2009
If you were curious about the crystalline structure of iron mentioned in the last post, here it is — a molecul…
Read moreScience 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 more
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 […]
Martian soil is nice for rice.
Science News reports on a presentation at the recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by researcher Abhilash Ramachandran, who found that rice – one of […]
Science Art: ISS Aug 2005, by NASA.
The Space Shuttle Discovery shot this photo of the International Space Station flying high over the Caspian Sea during the STS-114 Return to Flight mission. […]