Viable sperm sent on a postcard
New Scientist opens a new, fertile field of biological research with the discovery at Japan’s University of Yamanashi that it’s possible to freeze-dry viable sperm […]
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 moreThe Gulf Stream *might* be collapsing already.
The Guardian, a British paper, opens itself to the possibility of a near-Arctic future England after looking at some cold, hard facts. The Gulf Stream, […]
Bees on java.
Scientific American marvels at caffeinated bumblebees, and the researchers who give busy bees caffeine and sugar to make them more focused and efficient: [University of […]
Science Art: Head of Falcon, Showing Beak, Nostril, Eye, and Ear…, 1889
From an impressive page of bird diagrams in the Rand, McNally & Co.’s Encyclopedia and Gazetteer. “Birds are in some ways the highest of vertebrate […]
“Willful” control of the brain’s feel-good chemical.
Science Daily shows how UC-Davis researchers are teaching mice how to consciously control the dopamine in their brains, turning on the reward centers of their […]
Why are these Patagonian lakes turning pink?
The only answer is “We don’t really know,” but as Reuters explains, that isn’t really good news however you look at it: The lakes, located […]
Science Art: Black and White Image From Ingenuity‘s Third Flight, April 2021.
This is a photo taken by the Mars helicopter Ingenuity‘s navigational camera. Although it doesn’t say so in the NASA image gallery where I found […]
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 […]
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 […]