How do you say “dinosaur” in Zulu?
BBC Future muses over the ways in which language can limit scientific research – when you don’t have the words for a concept: For Zulu-speaking […]
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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Science Art: Ophir Chasma, ESP_062483_1755, by the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory HiRise.
Click to embiggen vastly This is half of a stereoscopic image of the surface of Mars. The other half is
SONG: Under Orion’s Arms
SONG: “Under Orion’s Arms”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: SPACE.com, 3 January 2020, “Will Bright Star Betelgeuse Finally Explode? A Look at the Dimming Red Giant in […]
Ozone-eating chemicals (remember fluorocarbons?) are warming the Arctic.
Nature reports on an old environmental menace. Climate simulations, they say, show that the mass emission of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) beginning in the 1950s could be […]
We’re cooler than we used to be. Literally – human body temperatures have dropped.
The Wall Street Journal reports that since the average human body temperature of 98.7 degrees F was first established, the average human has gotten taller, […]
Science Art: Quasi-Poloidal Stellarator (QPS), 2007
Click to embiggen This is a fusion reactor that was never built, a small power plant that takes the principles of a tokamak (use super-heated […]
Living concrete photosynthesizes, reproduces itself – thanks to gelatin..
The New York Times covers a building material that could be a boon to the planet, a bacteria-enriched concrete that cleans the air and grows […]
Pigeonbot flies on wings that change shape.
Science News introduces us to a robot that flies on wings that can change shape just like a real bird’s: Now, using new insights into […]
Oyster farms against beach erosion: a coastal win-win
Popular Science describes (a bit briefly) a real pearl of a concept, introducing the gentle, coast-restoring art of oyster-tecture: Undoing our damage to oysters can […]
Science Art: Pyramid of the Sun and the Moon (1825-1835), by Jean-Frédéric Maximilien de Waldeck
Click to embiggen A painting of Mayan pyramids by a mysterious man, described on Public Domain Review (where I found this image) as an “artist, […]
Learning from the ashes of Notre Dame
Nature takes a look at how the tragic fire at Notre Dame last year created a unique opportunity for researchers to study medieval construction: The […]
Closing in on the virus behind China’s new pneumonia outbreak.
Scientific American and STAT (with the help of the World Health Organization) inch us a little closer to identifying the microbe behind the mysterious outbreak […]
So Orion’s shoulder might be about to explode.
Something’s going on up there. SPACE.com actually says it’s a good idea to watch the skies “just in case” Betelgeuse is about to blow up: […]
Science Art: From The Helicopters Are Coming, 1944.
Click to embiggen This illustration, by Erik Nitsche and Roslyn Welcher, is from a book by CBF Macauley that claims to be “the first complete […]
U.S. returns pre-Spanish copper coins to Mexico.
Mexico News Daily reports on a trove of 3,500 coins – long, copper strips used for exchange as early as 1200 CE – that U.S. […]