Mammoth hunt pushes first North American settlers back by a few millennia.
PhysOrg looks at the remains of what UT Austin researchers have determined was a 37,000-year-old mammoth hunt in New Mexico, a place where scientists didn’t […]
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…
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Science Art: Holothuria tubulosa (Sjogurka stor ugglan, a sea cucumber) from Nordisk Familjebok, 1919.
The sea cucumber doesn’t look like much until you really look at it. They’re complicated little creatures. They have complicated little parts. In this case, […]
“Necrobotic” spiders grab things more precisely than machine fingers.
Rice University robotics engineers are playing with dead things – spiders, to be precise – and say they’ve come up with a breakthrough in precision […]
Saving the beach with some stick-and-palm-frond engineering.
Reuters reports from Senegal on a new anti-erosion project that uses dirt-cheap, pollution-free materials to defend an island from Atlantic swells that threaten to wash […]
Science Art: 20alpha-Dihydroprogesterone 3D spacefill, by Jynto, 2011.
Progesterone is a hormone released by ovaries. It’s made from cholesterol, which might seem odd. It’s a key component in birth-control pills and in hormone […]
SONG: Octopus Gloves
SONG: “Octopus Gloves”. (OGG version) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Science News 13 July 2022, “This octopus-inspired glove helps humans grip slippery objects,” as used in the […]
Social media makes people unhappy… but it doesn’t have to.
Scientific American takes a look at our online habits and finds we’re not making ourselves happy. The technology makes us lose track of time, disrupts […]
Magic mirror brings the Buddha’s enlightenment… when the light hits it just right.
CNN reports on an unexpected discovery in the Cincinnati Art Museum’s East Asian collection, where an unremarkable-looking bronze mirror was just revealed to reflect a […]
Science Art: Cetorhinus maximus, by Greg Skomal
Basking sharks are really big. As fish go, only whale sharks get bigger, and only then sometimes. And both of them eat plankton, not sailors. […]
Octopus gloves. They grab things better.
Science News reports on gloves that are especially good at picking slippery things up and sticking to ’em thanks to “rapidly switchable” materials inspired by […]
The orange-blossom odor of mosquito-borne diseases… actually attracts mosquitoes.
Science News takes a long whiff of a chemical that smells like oranges and flowers that’s given off by people (and other mammals) infected with […]
Science Art: Fig 61, A Voyage in Space, “Fragments from the Rings Falling into the Sun,” 1915.
This is an illustration of a defunct theory. The idea being put forward explains sunspots as the impacts of meteors, which come from the rings […]
Little arms: T. rex didn’t invent them, and they didn’t come out of nowhere.
Science News looks at a newly discovered, large-headed carnivorous dinosaur that, like T. rex, had surprisingly small forelimbs. But these independently evolved little arms were […]
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria discovered in Antarctica. The question is: Will they stay there?
Reuters enlightens a pandemic-weary world with news of a discovery of new life in the icy wastes of Antarctica. Unfortunately, the Chilean scientists study the […]
Science Art: The galactic habitable zone of the Milky Way, as predicted by Lineweaver et al (2004), NASA/Caltech 2013.
Solar systems have a “goldilocks zone” where planets capable of sustaining life forms similar to ours can form. Well, galaxies might also have a goldilocks […]