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Okay, riddle me this, kids: The local NBC affiliate’s nightly news keeps running items about how Los Angeles residents are not returning their census forms. The anchorman reports hyper-specific percentages each evening of how many of us have not responded. On Thursday night he said that less than 72% of the city had completed the [...]
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GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A gift of more than 2 million butterfly and moth specimens to the University of Florida contains hundreds and possibly more than 1,000 new unnamed species, and will help researchers better understand biodiversity and environmental changes. The gift to the Florida Museum of Natural History from Dr. William and Nadine McGuire of [...]
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The comments on these amazing photos of the Large Hadron Collider are almost as awesome as the machine.
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Wow. I (finally) just finished reading Krakatoa — The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, by Simon Winchester. Crazy stuff. I liked it. It’s a smidge on the textbook-side, but he’s an entertaining enough writer — and the topic is so incredible — that you don’t ever get bored during its 380-ish pages. The [...]
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This weekend I finally finished Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. It was a terrific read, truly wonderful. Bryson managed to make even the most esoteric, incredibly — for lack of a better word — boring details about life on this planet inconceivably fascinating. I mean really, it takes a brilliant author to [...]
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Am I the only one that is just completely amazed that the Voyagers are still going strong? “NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered the solar system’s final frontier, a vast, turbulent expanse where the Sun’s influence ends and the solar wind crashes into the thin gas between stars.” That’s really crazy. Voyager I is about [...]
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Here’s one for the “weird” file: GIANTmicrobes! I always wanted a stuffed rhinovirus! We make stuffed animals that look like tiny microbes — only a million times actual size! Each 5-to-7 inch doll is accompanied by an image of the real microbe it represents, as well as information about the microbe. link via 8 Ways [...]
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“Three-dimensional tubes of living tissue have been printed using modified desktop printers filled with suspensions of cells instead of ink. The work is a first step towards printing complex tissues or even entire organs.”
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Paleontologist Gregory M. Erickson of Florida State University answers the question, “What are the odds of a dead dinosaur becoming fossilized?” on this week’s Scientific American: Ask the Experts.
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A dazzling solar eclipse will be on display across a broad swath of the western United States, Mexico, Canada and Asia on Monday, with as much as 99 percent of the sun obscured by the moon. The eclipse will begin at 5:13 p.m. PDT, with best viewing time around 6:20. [Update: Damn. I totally forgot to [...]
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