“Looty”: using NFTs to steal back looted African artworks, digitally.
Reuters describes the Looty Project as one man’s crusade to finance new artists in Nigeria and Benin by selling NFTs minted from 3D images of […]
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 moreNo song today.
I have a great musical track, a hummed melody, a couple ideas about pseudosatellites and diddly-squat words. More when I can get some words, and […]
Science Art: Power spectrum of Siemens star with 1024 line pairs per image height, by Bautsch, 2012.
This is a Siemens star, a pattern used to calibrate optical equipment – to see how well the lens (or raster, or driver, or whatever) […]
It feels less evil the second time around.
The Journal of Experimental Psychology defines something I think we’ve all had a feeling about – that the more you encounter a bad deed (or […]
Laugh, quantum computer, laugh… in IBM’s gum tree.
Popular Science discusses what could be IBM’s quantum breakthrough – a quantum processor named “Kookaburra” that’s set to start computing in 2025: Last year, IBM […]
Science Art: “Ballon à col sinueux employé par M. Pasteur dans ses expériences contre la génération spontanée”, 1873.
This is some laboratory glassware used in Pasteur’s experiments, as illustrated in Les merveilles de l’industrie, an 1873 science book that has a marvelous gallery […]
Bats mimic buzzing hornets to scare predators away.
Science magazine reveals the first known case of a mammal mimicking insect noises, in a study that found greater mouse-eared bats imitate stinging insect buzzes […]
Pop-song paradox: What it takes to be a one-hit wonder is the opposite of what it takes to have a long career.
Science News examines the science of the Top 40, with a survey of the charts that found what goes into that first, breakthrough hit is […]
Science Art: Cover, Introduction to Transistors & Transistor Projects, 1972.
This is… well, let me just quote the preface: This book is intended to show the electronics experimenter how the transistor was developed, how it […]
Solar plane can do the job of a satellite without going into space.
CNN is covering the Skydweller, a plane powered by more than 17,000 solar panels, enabling it to stay aloft for month, doing the same work […]
Got allergic asthma? Congratulations – you’ve also got some COVID-19 protection.
Science News looks at interleukin-13, an immune-system protein linked with allergies that make it hard to breathe – and make it hard for the SARS-CoV-2 […]
Science Art: Lycidae, Plate XVIII, Edw. A. Smith, 1879
These are beetles, mostly from southern Asia except the last one, Dexoris, which is from Sierra Leone. These specific beetles became British (perhaps posthumously) and […]
Smallpox vaccine got a boost … from skin bacteria.
The-Scientist explores a strange interaction that helped eliminate smallpox without us even noticing. The vaccine that helped eliminate this killer got an extra boost from […]
Camera lens based on a trilobite’s eye keeps objects in focus near and far.
Science News looks at the world through the eyes of Dalmanitina socialis, a creature extinct for 400 million years who could focus on objects as […]
Science Art: Blast Engine, 1870s.
This was one of the attractions in the Machinery Hall of the Great Centennial Exhibition of 1876, a blast engine made by the I.P. Morris […]