Life that can survive a full-on asteroid impact.
Mashable discusses the discovery at Johns Hopkins of microbes that are hardy enough to have traveled across the vacuum of space and then survived the […]
physics
Science Art: From Les raisons des forces mouuantes, etc., 1615.
This is a light experiment from the 1600s, which I found in the British Library archive over yonder. The book, Les raisons des forces &c […]
Science Art: Violet-Rays!, 1917
This is an ad from the April 1917 edition of Hugo Gernsback’s The Electrical Experimenter, which you can read on archive.org here. I can only […]
Science Art: Apparatus Arranged for Taking a Radiograph, 1894.
This illustration is from an article in Science Gossip on how to set up your own “X-Ray Outfit.” As the author, James Quick, explains: “The […]
Science Art: Fluorescence and birefringence of 445 nm blue laser in calcite crystal, Jan Pavelka, 2011.
Calcite refracts light in a linear way – it’s why (as previous songs have discussed) it may have been used as a navigational tool by […]
Locusts raised in a centrifuge have stronger skeletons.
Science Magazine gets heavy with insects that, when brought up in the “hypergravity” of a spinning centrifuge, grow stronger exoskeletons as a result: When a […]
Roman glass became photonic crystal
Physics Magazine joins Tufts University researcher Giulia Guidetti who has studied a glass shard that was broken and buried shortly after 100 B.C.E. that over […]
Baseball hitters are getting more home runs, thanks to climate change.
Science reports on some unexpected consequences of a slightly warmer planet. In the statistics-heavy game of baseball, hitters have been averaging more home runs than […]
A bee swarm can generate 8 times more electricity than a storm cloud.
New Scientist reveals an accidental discovery that happened when a passing swarm of bees got close to a weather station on a clear day – […]
One step closer to a laser-powered fusion reactor.
Science magazine celebrates a test result from the National Ignition Laboratory that brings us all one step closer to cheap, clean energy by using lasers […]
Science Art: Flight Trajectory by Walther Hermann Ryff, 1582.
An illustration from a book the title of which begins Bawkunst Oder Architectur aller fürnemsten/ Nothwendigsten/ angehœrigen Mathematischen vnd Mechanischen Kuensten/ eygentlicher Bericht/ vnd verstændtliche […]
Science Art: Circular Twilight Halo at Sunrise (Kreisförmiger Dämmerungsschein Bei Sonnenaufgang) by Eduard Moritz Pechuël-Loesche, 1884
A soft and beautiful drawing of distant, unimaginable destruction. Eduard Moritz Pechuël-Loesche was a naturalist in Hereroland (now Namibia) when he painted this watercolor in […]
The mystery of sand.
XKCD’s Randall Munroe, writing now for The New York Times, explores a scientific mystery more baffling than quantum physics – what makes sand feel softer […]
The UK has powered up an unusual fusion reactor.
Science magazine takes us inside the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST) Upgrade, an experimental fusion reactor which has been switched on after a 7-year build […]
CERN is building a supercollider 100 km around.
Nature looks into a new push to build a really big (and really expensive) machine to work with really small particles: CERN has taken a […]