You 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 […]
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 moreWe’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 […]
Science Art: Map IX: The Constellations of June and July by William Peck.
Click to embiggen An image of the summer sky (in the Northern Hemisphere) by William Peck, F.R.A.S., from his book, The constellations and how to […]