SONG: Listening
SONG: “Listening”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Scientific American, 13 July 21, “The Neuroscience of Taking Turns in a Conversation,” as used in the post “The neurology […]
SONG: Sleeping Cathedrals
SONG: “Sleeping Cathedrals”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “World’s biggest whale g…
Read moreScience Art: Build Your Own Lie Detector, 1955
This is the opener for an article in the May 1955 issue of Popular Electronics. You can read the article here, …
Read moreScience Art: Collops bipunctatus, U, Back, SD, Pennington County, 2013
This image of a Collops bipunctatus, a beetle from the Melyridae family, was taken by Sam Droege from flowers …
Read moreScience Art: Histologist Microscope, 1900
An illustration of an elegant optical device from Science Gossip magazine (a publication which I discovered via…
Read moreScience Art: Rudimentary Simulator, 1963.
This is Figure 3 from “Man-Machine System Simulation for Flight Vehicles” by Steven Belsley, an article which w…
Read moreScience Art: Astrapia Splendidissima, 1895
This is the first illustration in the article “A New Bird of Paradise” by the Hon. Walter Rothschild, published…
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Tomato plants have a kind of nervous system.
New Scientist reports on research at the Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil, where Gabriela Niemeyer Reissig and colleagues have found that tomatoes being eaten […]
A square meter of concrete can store the electricity of two AA batteries.
Scientific American looks at a weird new power source, using probably the most common building material in the modern world as a kind of rechargeable […]
Science Art: Car 5400, where are you?, 1965.
This is an advertisement in the back of the May/June 1965 issue of Information Display, the journal of the Society for Information Display. It’s a […]
The neurology of conversations, or how our brains know when it’s our turn to speak.
Scientific American turns to chatty songbirds to figure out how it is that our brains process cues telling us when to talk and when to […]
There’s a new branch of psychology dedicated to the study of B.S.
PsyPost, reporting on a study in Psychological Reports, introduces us to the OBPS, a way to scientifically quantify the amount of useless, stupid nonsense we’re […]
These drones can be flying grenades.
Popular Science reports on the U.S. Marine Corps’ experimental flying explosive robots: What sets the Drone 40 apart from a host of other small drone […]
Icy expedition hopes to find Shackleton’s Endurance.
LiveScience looks to Antarctica, where a new expedition hopes to find Endurance, the ship which carried polar explorer Ernest Shackleton to the frozen south before […]
Science Art: Alvarezsaurus calvoi, Reconstruction, by Karkemish.
A cute little dinosaur, about the size of greyhound and just as much built for speed. Which is strange, because on the other end – […]
Dinosaurs were already in decline before the asteroid.
Britain’s University of Bristol has looked at a few million years of evidence and found that it points to a grim fact about the dinosaurs. […]
People get more done working a four-day week.
An Icelandic thinktank, Alda, has published a report on two multiyear studies that indicate it really is better to work smarter, not harder – or […]
Magic mushrooms make lasting changes to the brain (and that’s a good thing).
Technology Networks reports on new Yale University research that apparently explains why psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, has a long-lasting antidepressant effect. The […]
Social media a threat to humanity, warn biologists, ecologists, and other unlikely experts.
Recode echoes a warning published in PNAS and signed by 17 researchers in fields as disparate as climate science, biology, and philosophy. They’re convinced that […]
Science Art: Spectacled Caiman and a False Coral Snake by Dorothea Maria Graff
An illustration of two reptiles, from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium II. These two creatures were painted sometime in the first decade of the 1700s by German […]
Using cows to end plastic pollution.
Inverse considers the environmental power of the cow, whose immense domestic population increases greenhouse gases (pardon me), but could also, new research proposes, be harnessed […]