Supernovas have caused mass extinctions. (As if asteroids weren’t bad enough.)
Science Daily reports on radioactivity research that has found evidence that at least one mass extinction event in Earth’s history was caused not by an […]
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, …
Read moreThe one molecule that turns grasshoppers into locusts.
Science News reveals the one chemical that transforms harmless, solitary insects into a crop-destroying, famine-triggering locust swarm: Now, scientists have pinpointed a compound emitted by […]
Science Art: Booby Gannet, by John James Audubon
Click to embiggen A quizzical and curious sea bird, from Birds of America, presented by The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.
SONG: Campfires
SONG: “Campfires” ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on Science Daily, 16 July 2020, “Solar Orbiter’s first images reveal ‘campfires’ on the Sun”, as used in the […]
Ceres shines brightest where there’s salt water under the surface.
Science Daily looks to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where the dwarf planet Ceres spins – and may serve as a vast reservoir […]
Spinning yarn from human skin
PhysOrg reminds me here of a piece of jewelry my mother won at an auction, which she then gave to me to give to the […]
Google, Facebook should be scared. Targeted ads shown to be less profitable than the old way.
Wired has a story that seems slightly obscure at first, but really strikes at the cornerstone of today’s internet. The main Dutch public broadcaster, Nederlandse […]
Science Art: The many faces of the Sun from Solar Orbiter’s EUI and PHI instruments, 2020
Click to embiggen It’s my mother’s birthday today. Here, nine glorious suns for a Leo. They were photographed by the European Space Agency’s Extreme Ultraviolet […]
We’re going to save the mussels of Appalachia. Yes, we are.
Science News has something (perhaps small, perhaps strange) to be optimistic about. The endangered river mussels of America’s eastern mountains might go back to cleaning […]
We’re still looking at the effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Science magazines has some striking visualizations of the atomic bombing’s long-lasting repercussions in their latest issue – and have had their graphics managing editor, Alberto […]
We’ve got a new way to predict solar flares.
Science Daily shares research from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, that gives us a new handle on predicting when the worst solar flares will […]
Sperm do lopsided barrel-rolls. They don’t have propeller tails.
Science News dashes the popular image of sperm as swimming furiously by spinning their tails like boat propellers. Instead, the little guys only move their […]
Science Art: Phases of the Moon, 1844.
Click to embiggen The moon is a body in space that reflects the light of our sun back at us. Which might sound a little […]
Neanderthals were more sensitive to pain.
Nature produces one more clue that if any prehistoric “cave men” were the tough, insensitive brutes, it was our ancestors. Neanderthals, a new gene study […]
Dancing is better than repetitive exercise for keeping elderly brains fit.
PLOS ONE has an interesting look at brain plasticity – that is, your ability to learn new things, change the way you do things, and […]