Trees grow six times taller in strange Amazonian soil.
BBC’s Science Focus is digging in the dirt to get inside the mystery of “dark earth,” which seems to make the Amazon as fertile as […]
anthropology
Science Art: We Live With the Seminoles opener, 1942
This is the first page of an article from Natural History Magazine‘s April 1942 edition, which I found on archive.org. Today, the Seminole Tribe owns […]
Science Art: Long-Tsing-Yu or Les Yeux des Dragon
These are some of the first goldfish ever seen in Europe. The image (which I found in a great Public Domain Review article) came from […]
Science Art: Lincoln’s Measurements, compared with “Old Americans,” 1953 (detail).
This is part of a graphic from a 1953 issue of Natural History, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s magazine. The article it’s illustrating is […]
Science Art: Trojeborg, a stone labyrinth from Visby, 1919
This is an illustration from Nordisk Familjebok, a Norwegian encyclopedia from the turn of the last century. The labyrinth, naturally, is much older. It’s of […]
SONG: Migration Roads
SONG: “Migration Roads”. (available as .ogg here) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on LiveScience, 3 May 2024, “1st Americans came over in 4 different waves from […]
Science Art: Ancient Ritual White Jade Disk of Heaven…, 1937
This is an illustration from a 1937 edition of Natural History magazine, an article called “Chinese Design.” This is a “Disk of Heaven,” or bi, […]
Exercise scientists: women hunted, men gathered
Scientific American upends the old idea that manly men evolved to hunt for meat for growing prehistoric families with physiological evidence that women – who […]
SONG: The Scientist (a penitential Coldplay cover)
SONG: “The Scientist (a penitential cover)”. (available as .ogg here) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: This isn’t based on research It’s a cover of this vaguely scientific […]
Women hunted, back in the hunter-gatherer days.
PhysOrg has a study that defies the conventional idea of “man the hunter, woman the gatherer” with evidence that, in more than three-quarters of contemporary […]
SONG: Content Feeds
SONG: “Content Feeds”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: The Markup, 1 May 2023, “The Very Hungry Algorithm: Bedtime with ChatGPT,” as used in the post “How do […]
How do you feel when the AI starts reading your young children their bedtime stories?
As The Markup points out, this is no longer a hypothetical question, but an actual parenting challenge now: I made a note to ask his […]
Science Art: Causerie sur la Peche Fluviale en Chine, 1909.
Do two sampans make a catamaran? Looks like they did for this Chinese fisherman at the dawn of the last century, angling on the river […]
SONG: The Elephant
SONG: “The Elephant”. ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: BBC 28 Feb 2023, “Kerala: India temple replaces elephant with robot for rituals,” as used in the post “Kerala […]
Kerala temple introduces a robot ritual elephant.
BBC reports on a mechanical elephant that is replacing a flesh-and-blood elephant that previously conducted rituals in a temple in Kerala, India: The initiative by […]