Clik here to view.
'Hovv Yov Ovght to Hold Your Penne'
The subtle differences between "Good" and "Naught" when it comes to pen-holding (Richard Field, 1611, via the Folger Shakespeare Library) Writing is hard. And I don't just mean writing in the sense of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Google ABC Book
Google structures so much of life. What we can Google about something is nearly the same thing as what it is. And it's not just text: With Google Images, you can see what anything or anyone looks like...
View ArticleClik here to view.
World: We Have Lost the First Webpage. Professor: Oh, I Have a Copy of It...
1993 screenshot from an early web browser (CERN via NPR) Last week, NPR's All Things Considered featured a story called "The First Web Page, Amazingly, Is Lost." The piece ended with a plea: Perhaps...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The NYT Mag Editor Responds on the 'Terror in the Skies' Article
A few minutes ago Hugh Lindgren, editor of the New York Times Magazine, sent me this official response to questions about the veracity of the back-page article it published two weeks ago, "The Plane...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Trippy Timelapse of Curiosity's Mission to Mars So Far
Ron Wayman/NASA Computer programmer Karl Sanford has made an awesome timelapse (embedded below) covering the first 281 sols (Martian days) of the Curiosity rover's exploration of the red planet, a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Oops! This Lab Neglected to Return the Samples of Moondust NASA Loaned It
One of the 20 vials of moondust found in Berkeley storage (Marilee Bailey via Berkeley Lab) In 1969, after the Apollo 11 crew returned from their historic mission to the moon, the rocks and soil...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Genetically Engineering an Icon: Can Biotech Bring the Chestnut Back to...
Lumberjacks stand besides old-growth chestnut trees in North Carolina around 1909/1910 (Forest History Society, Durham, North Carolina) "The forests of America," John Muir wrote in The Atlantic in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'Pilot's Salt': The Third Reich Kept Its Soldiers Alert With Crystal Meth
A bottle of Pervitin, dating from around 1940. The packing reads: "Alertness aid," to be taken "to maintain wakefulness" -- but, it continues with an exclamation point, "only from time to time"! (via...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What Neurons Looks Like (as Drawn by Students, Grad Students, and Professors)
Science Education What would you draw if somebody told you to draw a neuron? According to a new study, your sketch will depend on how much science education you have, but not in the way you'd expect....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mainly Positive Software News
Positive: Big summertime sale on "artisanal software" for the Mac, with logos above. This includes two programs I use all day every day, Scrivener and Tinderbox. Tinderbox is a powerful but complex...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Amazingly, Actual Molecules Look Just Like High School Textbook Drawings
Sciencexpress Those little hexagons you studied in high-school chemistry -- they are real things! Real, tiny, tiny things that make up the world around us, and that, with the help of an "atomic...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Proposal: Armstrong Flubbed His Big Moon Speech Because of Ohio
One small step for (a) man: Armstrong alights on the lunar surface, July 20, 1969. (NASA) One of the outstanding debates about Neil Armstrong's historic first steps on the moon concerns the speech that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
This Is What Happens When a Galaxy Runs Out of Gas
A false-color ultraviolet image of the dwarf galaxy IC3418 with its ram-pressure-stripped tail of young stars, shown on a false-color X-Ray image of the Virgo cluster and showing hot gas in the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Meaning of Riff Raff: Why a Bizarre, Controversial Rapper Is One of...
Today, Vine rolled out for Android phones, having made it onto 13 million iPhones since the Twitter-owned service launched in January. Vine works like this: Users record up to 6 seconds of video in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Artist in the Mirror, as Seen Through a Smartphone
The Droste effect occurs when a picture appears within itself, in a place where a different picture would generally be expected. You may know the effect, in art, as mise en abyme (as in Velazquez's...
View ArticleClik here to view.
New Government Documents Show the Sean Parker Wedding Is the Perfect Parable...
Hey, if a billionaire couple wants to spend $10 million on their wedding, it's neither all that surprising nor interesting, as far as I'm concerned. So, when news and statistics started to trickle out...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Scientists Gave Prairie Voles a Love Drug, and It Worked
Ryan Stephens/Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources/Rebecca J. Rosen Of all the animals in the mammal class, very, very few (just three percent, according to one survey) display the romantic...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Animal Behaviorist: We'll Soon Have Devices That Let Us Talk With Our Pets
There's so much these guys want to tell you. (Shutterstock/Jaren Jai Wicklund) We all try to talk with animals, but very few of us do so professionally. And even fewer are trying to build devices that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
NASA Reveals New, Detailed Portraits of Two of Our Closest Galactic Neighbors
NASA The next time you have a chance to look up at the night sky, bare in mind that nearly every thing you can see with your bare eyes is something in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Of the 100 to 200...
View ArticleClik here to view.
No Big Deal, Just a Giant Hole in the Sun
A massive coronal hole, captured in its rotation toward Earth (NASA/SDO) Coronal holes are areas on the sun's corona that are darker, lower-density, and (relatively) colder than the rest of the plasma...
View Article