Science Art: Alternator by Ganz & Co, 1905
This is a Wechselstrommaschine, an alternator. The wheel goes around, and the spokes hit contacts – one set makes the electricity go in one direction […]
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…
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, …
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Wild bees do $1.5 billion-worth of pollinating for six crops alone.
Science News looks beyond the domesticated honeybee for unsung pollination heroes: the bumblebees, mason bees, carpenter bees and other native bees that do an enormous […]
SONG: Science (a penitential cover)
SONG: “Science (a penitential cover)” ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: This has no scientific source data; it’s a penitential cover for being late for the April song. […]
Picture your hand writing a message, and this brain-implant computer will type it.
I’ll just copy the Science News headline here and say “Brain implants turn imagined handwriting into text on a screen“: A 65-year-old man had two […]
Science Art: Schematic illustration of skeleton of Glyptotherium arizonae (modified for Glyptotherium after Burrmeister and Hoffstetter), 1981.
The giant armadillo of Pleistocene-era Arizona, from David D. Gillette’s Smithsonian publication, Glyptodonts of North America, found on archive.org. Based on their teeth and joints, […]
Really old poop yields really new microbes – and new medical treatments.
Omaha digs deep for a story on how millennia-old feces has reintroduced us to some long-lost germs in the human gut biome – that might […]
The US is building a big wind farm.
Bloomberg reports on a Biden-administration initiative to build a massive, $2.8 billion windmill installation off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard: “The whole industry has been […]
Science Art: Acrosome Reaction Diagram
Happy Mother’s Day! Wikimedia Commons user LadyofHats made this image of motherhood. And fatherhood, I suppose. Technically, this fertilization is happening in a sea urchin, […]
Bees trained to detect COVID can speed up testing.
Reuters has a sweet story on honeybees that have been trained by Wim van der Poel at Wageningen University to expect a treat every time […]
On the memory of trees.
Scientific American looks at the work of ecologist Suzanne Simard, and her efforts to preserve “mother trees,” which have intelligence, memories, and even look out […]
Turning hard-to-recycle plastics into jet fuel, diesel, and gasoline.
Science Advances outlines a way to use a platinum-tungten-zirconium catalyst (“Pt/WO3/ZrO2” for short) along with a zeolite crystal to turn trash into, if not treasure, […]
Science Art: Holothuria Pentactes, Lin. – die Rippenblasse, from from Gemeinnüzzige Naturgeschichte des Thierreichs (A Natural History of the Animal Kingdom).
That’s the funniest lookin’ carrot I’ve ever seen. A real cuckoo-maria. In fact, that’s its name now – Cucumaria frondosa is the scientific name, and […]
Lighting cleans the air even more than we thought.
Science News chases the storm chasers who found some surprising air-purifying oxidant chemicals in the wake of major lightning strikes: Researchers knew lightning produces nitric […]
China ready to launch a big chunk of space station.
Scientific American prepares for the launch of a new place in space – the core module of the CSS (China Space Station), which, after 29 […]
Blood-sugar test gives us the first way to quantify exactly how hungry you are.
Nature reports on experiments mapping out exactly how hungry people will feel over the next 24 hours – giving a hard number to what’s usually […]