Preparing for another set of CRISPR-modified babies.
Nature reports on another geneticist – a Russian, this time – who has announced that he, too, will be gene-modifying human babies for HIV-positive mothers: […]
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 moreYou are your own threat to your air quality. (Well, one of the threats, anyway.)
Science Daily reports on the discovery that human skin oils react with ozone in the atmosphere inside your office or house to create “the Pig-Pen […]
We’re running out of… sand?
Nature says that our need for silicon – the main substance in computer chips, as well as glass windows, bottles, and things like bricks and […]
Science Art: X-Ray Lab, cartoon from Resonance: Journal of Scientific Education, August 1996.
Click to embiggen It’s funny, see? See? This cartoon appeared in Resonance between an article called “Genetics to Genetic Algorithms: Solution to Optimisation Problems Using […]
An inoculation against fake news: a video game in which you create propaganda.
The University of Cambridge has studied 15,000 people and determined that playing a quick browser game is effective in getting folks to resist the seductive […]
Song is late
Will happen soon. Have tracks, but words are hard.
Science Art: Water, by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1566
Click to embiggen I’m not sure if this really is a scientific illustration, but I think, given the time, it counts as natural history. This […]
Yep, that whale was plenty weird. Half narwhal, half beluga.
Science News shares the genetic solution to a puzzle that’s had marine biologists (and Greenland whale hunters) puzzled since the 1980s. Namely, what the heck […]
Robot fish has battery blood.
Nature powers up with a mechanical fish that runs off a circulating liquid power source: The roughly 40-centimetre soft robot doesn’t have solid batteries — […]
Boaty McBoatface’s Big Breakthrough
The Telegraph reports on the internet’s favorite ocean-going vessel, the submersible Boaty McBoatface, and the plucky little robot sub has just been doing some potentially […]
Bigger houses aren’t making people happier.
They’re just taking up more space. That’s the conclusion, published in The Atlantic, of researchers looking at how satisfied people are with their homes – […]
Science Art: favorite image Petrus Plancius Instructing Students in the Science of Navigation, early 17th century
Click to embiggen The Age of Exploration included at least a little bit of schoolwork. Here are navigation students learning the ways of current and […]
How the zebra got its stripes. (An 85-year-old researcher’s first published study!)
Popular Science thinks they know – and the answer is literally cool: Now the 85-year-old amateur scientist [Allison Cobb] has published her first scientific study […]
Ancient stoners used wooden bowls. (Not the kind on pipes, either.)
Science News traces the history of highs to a Chinese site where 2,500-year-old tombside remains indicate that smoldering cannabis was stacked in wooden bowls for […]
Why do bats live so long? And how can we live longer too?
Ars Technica tries to discover what it is about bats that could help us humans live longer, healthier lives: For the most part, as the […]