A brittle star’s whole body is an eye.
Scientific American looks at how these starfish relatives don’t need eyes to see: And yet now there appears to be something far stranger about the […]
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 moreSONG: Your Catalogue
SONG: “Your Catalogue”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: NBC News, “New wild cat species is ide…
Read moreScience Art: Beebe's Bathysphäre, 1934
This is an image of William Beebe’s bathysphere, as placed on Wikimedia Commons by ETH Bibliothek. It was creat…
Read moreScience Art: Power of RCA Electron Microscope, May 1955
These are diatoms, I think, seen by two different microscopes.
As the caption from Popular Electronics says…
Read moreScience Art: Red Pepper, 1910.
Red pepper (Cayenne pepper) will cure almost any case of la grippe within 24 hours, or so they say. At least no…
Read moreScience Art: Figs. 1315-1333 (Various rotary piston engines), 1890.
This is a page of figures from (deep breath) The engineer’s sketch-book of mechanical movements, devices, appli…
Read moreHygiene theater: All the hand sanitizer in the world is kinda beside the point.
The Atlantic looks at the problem with the way public responses to the pandemic have evolved into rituals that look “disinfecting” but really aren’t nearly […]
Science Art: A section through the cochlea in the line of its axis, 1910.
Click to embiggen An inner ear, dear, from The human body; an account of its structure and activities and the conditions of its healthy working, […]
No song yet
Words are hard. It’s everything but words. Soon, soon.
Betelgeuse, the cannibal.
“Bad Astronomer” Phil Plait, over at SyFy.com, explains a new study that demonstrates how the red giant Betelgeuse might have gotten so big – by […]
New COVID hypothesis: not bat meat, but bat mines.
Guano mining is a real thing, and a really fascinating thing. And sometimes a really dangerous thing, too. The Bioscience Resource Project revisits the case […]
Science Art: Mechanische Maschinen und Automaten 49, from Bellicorum instrumentorum liber cum …, 1420-1430
This is something I first assumed was a very early typewriter or printing press, from the Bavarian State Library’s copy of Bellicorum instrumentorum liber cum […]
Help track satellites (for astronomers worried that they’re starting to block out the stars.)
Satellite Streak Watcher is a project on the AnecData citizen science site that asks anyone with a cell phone to take a picture of the […]
There are campfires on the Sun.
Science Daily shares some of the discoveries from the first images of the Solar Orbiter mission – including the presence of “mini-flares” that astronomers have […]
Radio telescopes have spotted four very strange… things.
LiveScience has more on the entirely new, bright-edged circular objects, the so-called “odd radio circles” or ORCs that astronomers are struggling to figure out: In […]
Science Art: From Here, a number of broken gifts for the carpenters and lovers…., by Lorenz Stöer, 1567.
Click to embiggen The title here is the best I could render from the middle German “Hier Inn etliche zerbrochne Gebew, den Schreinern in eingelegter […]
LSD use is rising among older folks – and it’s probably because people are looking for a way out. Even if it’s way out.
Scientific American analyzes the rise in LSD use and finds that it’s probably an attempt to lighten up – or at least get a new […]
Turning the virus into a videogame.
Ireland’s RTÉ Brainstorm reveals how researchers are turning ordinary personal computers into a virus-killing supercomputer and recruiting gamers to solve puzzles that figure out COVID-19 […]
Smell makes music inside our brains. Each aroma, a different melody.
Scientific American organizes some notes on the neurology of scent, with experiments that show the brain distinguishes between similar scents in the same way we […]
Science Art: Structures of Brain (Взаиморасположение структур мозга – зрительный анализатор), by Coxer
Click to embiggen A brain with its structures, including the eyes and the olfactory bulb, labeled in Russian. The thinking part. Found on Wikimedia Commons.