Forest fires boost bats.
Scientific American checks out how fire-prevention efforts are actually apparently hurting bat populations: In California’s Sierra Nevada ecosystem, bats have adapted to occasional blazes. But […]
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…
Read moreSome COVID-19 answers from Science News.
Science News has started a vetted Frequently Asked Questions page about the virus that’s on everyone’s mind now. It’s located here, but the most fun […]
China’s rover scoots around the dark side of the moon.
Science News is following the progress of China’s Chang’e-4 lander and Yutu-2 rover as they discover all sorts of new things about the layers of […]
Science Art: Amplifying Receiver, Sketch 1, April 1916
Click to embiggen slightly Electronics in 1916, from an article on making headphones for receiving radio transmissions in QST, the amateur wireless magazine of the […]
Possible pangolin exoneration as coronavirus source.
Fans of the scaly anteater otherwise known as the pangolin can take heart in Nature‘s latest report, that might not have been the source of […]
A salmon parasite can survive without oxygen, without mitochondria, and with a lot of mystery.
Science News reports on the humble jellyfish-relative that lives in the bodies of Pacific salmon and undersea worms, and gets along fine without any mitochondria […]
SONG: “Young and Stupid”
SONG: “Young and Stupid”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: The Guardian, 3 February 2020, “Girls beginning puberty almost a year earlier than in 1970s,” as used in […]
Science Art: Block diagram illustrating the simulator setup and primary tracking task, 1960.
Click to embiggen Astronauts gotta learn how to astronaut. This is from a NASA document from 1960 called Technical Note D-546: Experience with a Three-Axis […]
Girls really are growing up quicker – biologically speaking.
The Guardian looks at the slightly puzzling change in the age girls reach puberty around the world: For girls, experts say the best marker of […]
Compost burials really work.
Science News digs into the science behind leaving the world a slightly more fertile place when you go, by having your body naturally composted after […]
They found a merging pair of black holes. And they named the formation “Spikey.”
Scientific American introduces us to a a couple of black holes named Spikey: In 2017 astrophysicists Daniel D’Orazio and Rosanne Di Stefano detailed how a […]
Science Art: Taf. II: Palephyra indica, Atorella subglobosa, Sanderia malayensis, 1902.
Click to embiggen These are from Die acraspeden Medusen der deutschen Tiefsee-Expedition: 1898-1899, the first of two volumes on jellyfish written by Ernst Vanhöffen, a […]
A red snowman, past the orbit of Pluto
Nature shares the wonder of Arrakoth, the object once known as 2014 MU69, in the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto, the most distant world we’ve studied […]
New “reaper of death” tyrannosaur discovered in Canada.
National Geographic revels in the grisly remains of a killer found in a museum cabinet – bones that turned out to belong to a prehistoric […]
A particle called a “kaon” might just rewrite the rules of subatomic physics.
Sounds almost too Hollywood to be true, but Science News is covering some unexpected findings from a Japanese particle accelerator, where researchers say chaotic little […]