| memepool robotomy |
|
| Thursday Oct 4, 2012 | Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality; a preposterously long fanfic covering methods of rationality. to Science by isosceles |
| Thursday Apr 19, 2012 | Last week, the DeepSee Submersible spotted a very rare translucent octopus (the Vitrelladonella richardi) at the unusually shallow depth of 180m and took some stunning color photos and video.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Wednesday Apr 11, 2012 | Yuri's Night is a wild celebration of SPACE. Washington DC is having a special amount of celebration. to Science by isosceles |
| Wednesday Jun 7, 2006 | How can
this man fly like that without wings or a glider?
The short answer is
"the ground effect", but
the more you look into it, the
more complicated it gets. to Science by riotnrrd |
| Sunday Mar 26, 2006 | Thanks to the clever folks at NASA's Goddard Institute, anyone can tell the time on Mars, or Titan. to Science by caspian |
| Friday Nov 25, 2005 | Sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner? Don't blame
the turkey. to Science by riotnrrd |
| Saturday Oct 15, 2005 | The University of Florida
Book of Insect Records
is full of
fun facts
about things that want to lay
eggs in your brain.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Monday Aug 29, 2005 | MESSENGER took a lot of high-res photos of the Earth as it flew by on its way to Mercury. Its handlers have turned those pictures into a freakin' sweet movie. to Science by scromp |
| Sunday Aug 28, 2005 | Apparently dry spaghetti do not break in half. While that little bit of knowledge is certainly the basis of an excellent bet , it must take a ball or two make the same argument to the Physical Review Letters crowd. to Science by fool |
| Thursday Aug 25, 2005 | There are many theories of intelligent design. to Science by nucleus |
| Monday Aug 15, 2005 | It's not quite
webcams
in space, but Fourmilab
allows you to see
what Earth looks
like from the point of view of many different satellites. to Science by riotnrrd |
| Friday Mar 25, 2005 | Although I am not a vegetarian, I do not eat cephalopods (that is, squids, octopuses, cuttlefish and the like) because there is substantial evidence that they are quite intelligent, and have highly complex languages. Perhaps my efforts to protect intelligent species have allowed them to evolve further than they might have otherwise. Let me be the first to welcome our new bipedal overlords. to Science by pyrrhuloxia |
| Tuesday Mar 1, 2005 | It is possible to smelt some minerals and ores using microwave radiation. Recently, several resources have appeared, for those who wish to practice home metallurgy to Science by isosceles |
| Monday Feb 28, 2005 | Whether you see it as a clever optical illusion, or just a way to freak out your
friends, you definately should make yourself a
paper dragon that watches
you as you move your head.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Tuesday Feb 15, 2005 | These instructions outline
the procedures of
packing a fresh brain for
shipment to the New York Brain Bank. to Science by riotnrrd |
| Wednesday Nov 17, 2004 | Giving
wings to pigs
with the miracle of biotechnology! to Science by riotnrrd |
| Sunday Mar 14, 2004 | Entomologists studying the order Lepidoptera must get bored. How else could you explain the naming of insect species after punctuation marks? to Science by caspian |
| Saturday Mar 13, 2004 | The Octopus News keeps us up to date on the world of cephalopods. to Science by fringehead |
| Tuesday Mar 2, 2004 | Perpetual motion
machines don't work, but that doesn't stop
lots of eccentric
inventors from trying.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Tuesday Jan 13, 2004 | Now you will know what to do if
Mothra ever comes back. to Science by scromp |
| Sunday Jan 4, 2004 | Space is cool again. You may want to build a scale model of your favorite spacecraft while you have the chance. to Science by braino |
| Tuesday Dec 16, 2003 | The
Health Physics Instrumentation
Museum
houses a large collection of
posters,
medical instruments,
and
other artifacts
related to the scientific and commercial use of radioactivity.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Monday Nov 10, 2003 | If you're among the apparent minority who find TV shows about alien abductions and moon landing hoax theories to be more annoying than intriguing, Cable Science Network may eventually fill the gaps in your Tivo's schedule. to Science by scromp |
| Thursday Sep 18, 2003 | Why don't we try to
destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them?
to Science by gator |
| Sunday Sep 14, 2003 | Oddly beautiful, in an incredibly ugly way. Revered by the people of New Guinea, but responsible for more human deaths than polar bears, it's the flightless, water-loving, second-largest ratite in the world! to Science by yoyology |
| Monday Jul 21, 2003 | Crow builds hook tool to retrieve hard-to-get food bucket in a pipe (requires QuickTime). I can't wait for Junkyard Wars: Avian Tournament to Science by dnm |
| Tuesday Jul 15, 2003 | While the Iraqis may have had to seek the aid of
foreign powers to get a hold of some Uranium,
I just buy mine on the web. to Science by borges |
| Tuesday Jun 3, 2003 | Freezing water makes ice. Sometimes snow, sometimes hail, but basically the same old stuff. However, freezing a 14% solution of sawdust and water makes something entirely different. to Science by yoyology |
| Sunday Apr 27, 2003 | How many of you are reading this entry? I don't
mean how many people like you -- I mean
how many of you?
Talk it over with
people like you, and learn
What It All Means from a practical
standpoint. to Science by tinfoil |
| Tuesday Apr 15, 2003 | Some of the biggest and most awe-inspiring crystals in the world are the selenite deposits of the Naica mine of Chihuahua, Mexico. But don't try to take one home if you visit, or you might just end up with a Darwin Award. to Science by singe |
| Sunday Mar 23, 2003 | Whether you actually understood
A New Kind Of Science
or were just pretending,
Tim Tyler's
interated algorithmic systems including
cellular automata,
artificial life,
and evolved creatures
provide fascinating applet-based simulations.
to Science by joshua |
| Friday Mar 7, 2003 | Researchers around the world are studying basic elements. Some even try to create new ones.
There is a great deal of prestige associated with the discovery and naming of new elements. Some even go too far in their quest for glory. Now scientists have announced the discovery of the heaviest element known to science. to Science by nucleus |
| Friday Feb 14, 2003 | Bug Bytes not only collects insect sounds, it organizes them into meaningful categories like "Stored product insect movement and feeding sounds" and "Defensive stridulation by soil insects (dung beetles)" to Science by yoyology |
| Monday Feb 10, 2003 | As if in answer to our bad sci-fi
explosive
decompression prayers,
Dean Pentcheff brings us a video of what happens when a
crab
meets a 2700 p.s.i. gradient, more than a mile beneath the ocean. to Science by riotnrrd |
| Wednesday Jan 29, 2003 | Z O O M to Science by nucleus |
| Wednesday Jan 8, 2003 | The Young Man's
Book of Amusement is just the sort of archaic, dangerous book I used to prowl
libraries for as a kid. It's crammed with highly inadvisable science projects
such as an artificial volcano that's arguably not artificial at all. It is amusingly described by the father
of a young man who received this book as a gift from Michael Faraday.
to Science by obvious |
| Monday Jan 6, 2003 | If you don’t understand the fifth and coldest state of matter as well as you would like to, you can now make virtual
Bose-Einstein
Condensates
on the web. This will allow you to avoid the well-documented toil associated with building your own laboratory.
to Science by pyrrhuloxia |
| Thursday Nov 28, 2002 | The current energy hype focuses on hybrid engines and fuel cells, but neglects the efficient and safe external combustion engine. Robert Stirling's hot air engine was invented in 1816, before the science of thermodynamics. A large number of Stirling Engine models and kits are available, some beautiful, some precise, some simple, and some functional. The best, though, is the Stirling engine powered clock. While the technology may be a little difficult to understand, you can still make your own from test tubes or Coke cans and AOL CDs. Of course, they not as fun to say aloud as Wankel Rotary Engine.
to Science by enigma |
| Tuesday Nov 19, 2002 | Alice and Bob
may be computer science's most famous couple (even if they are
fictional).
They sure do get
around, though, and their
musical career
seems to be set to take off!
to Science by caspian |
| Tuesday Nov 12, 2002 | Tensegrity structures,
usually thought of as
toys
or
art objects,
may also be useful for
cheaply
constructing large enclosures.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Thursday Aug 8, 2002 | Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science has received a great deal of popular attention, but does it really live up to the hype? Reviews and commentary range from the skeptical to the unimpressed to the humorous to the downright cruel.
to Science by xihr |
| Wednesday Jul 31, 2002 | You can
make your
own soap
by reacting fat
and sodium
hydroxide or another strong base. to Science by gator |
| Sunday Jul 14, 2002 | When you are worried that your messages to aliens are going to look like cyphertext that needs to be decrypted, you should study up on Anticryptography. to Science by enigma |
| Monday Jul 8, 2002 | Ted Williams, the cranky but revered Red Sox outfielder died Friday, July 5th. Major league baseball is planning a tribute to the legend at Tuesday's All-Star Game in Milwaukee. His former team is planning a July 22 memorial service in Beantown. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, former teammates and other baseball greats are blasting Williams’ son, John Henry Williams, for his apparent plan to cryogenically freeze his father in the hopes of someday harvesting his DNA for cloning. to Science by rich |
| Tuesday Jun 11, 2002 |
Those annoying little Douglas Adams-inspired
animated gifs
may have something to them after all.
From deep inside the
Carina
(or Keyhole) Nebula,
we bring you:
The Cosmic
Finger of Friendship!
to Science by voidptr |
| Thursday Jun 6, 2002 | If you
eat enough
carrots
you
turn orange.
This is not
a lie.
to Science by belford |
| Thursday May 9, 2002 | HubbleSite has information and some stunning pictures from everyone's favorite (formerly a bit near-sighted) space telescope. The wallpapers alone are worth the visit, and the pages on inner workings of the telescope are particularly interesting. to Science by wwwwolf |
| Thursday May 2, 2002 | By adulthood, Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements
is firmly planted in a typical mind either as a tool for study or proof of mystical forces at work in nature. There are
alternative structures: some clever
and others using alternate media, extensions to the table providing nuclear structure, fermi surfaces, and
line spectra.
Still others are extraordinarily cross-thematic, merging chemistry with comic books, poetry or
haiku. But only the grouping-nature of the columns is retained in rejected elements,
condiments and beer.
Eventually the elements and the periodic qualities have been lost entirely, reducing the periodic table to a design template for topical lists of
funk and rock music,
comedy and TV shows,
famous mathematicians and presidents, even
SGI products. Soon a complete breakdown
of the scientific aspect yields no similarity to the original, becoming a
glorified table, a
marketing tool, or
hype itself.
There is mounting evidence of a conspiracy.
to Science by urog |
| Wednesday Mar 13, 2002 | All you could ever want to know about ants at Antbase -- now there's a formidable database. to Science by onigame |
| Sunday Mar 3, 2002 | This may seem rather odd, but according to David John Oates, it's real. He claims that if you reverse someone's speech, you will hear their thoughts spoken backwards.
!nuf evah to Science by 7layerburrito |
| Tuesday Feb 26, 2002 | It seems there exists a niche for one whose life's calling is gleaning data by studying a lot of old crap and taking notes about it. to Science by monde |
| Sunday Jan 6, 2002 | JPL solar system simulator: it's MapQuest for our neck of the galaxy.
to Science by riddle |
| Friday Jan 4, 2002 | If you don't know what an analemma is, check into it with this
cool applet
that saves you a year of time-lapse photography, or at least a lot of convoluted mathematics, per
graph. to Science by obvious |
| Tuesday Dec 18, 2001 | V.S. Ramachandran
is one of the leading researchers of
phantom limb pain.
Scientists used to think the reason people experienced pain in their amputated
limbs was because of nerves that were not fully severed, and would
do
further amputations to treat the problem. (Which didn't help at all).
Through his research, Ramachandran discovered that what was
actually happening was that the brain's
map of the body was
incorrectly remapped.
After publishing his theory, he started getting all kinds of
letters
from people, including some very
weird ones about people who experience orgasms in their feet (which
might explain
where
foot fetishes
come from).
While working with one patient, Ramachandran came up with a very ingenious
solution using a simple configuration of
mirrors to teach the brain the correct mappings.
to Science by laurel |
| Monday Dec 17, 2001 | Prosopagnosia is the medical term for "face blindness" -- a condition which causes an inability to recognize others by their faces. Sufferers can still see faces but don't have any special facility for identification, nor can they remember faces. Some are born with it, some discover it in themselves, and some develop it.
to Science by joshua |
| Monday Dec 3, 2001 | Did you know that kimchi was the first light emitting vegetable diode?
to Science by brainwave |
| Sunday Dec 2, 2001 |
Unlike other another work
of the same name, the Bell
Jar is dedicated to amateur construction and use of vacuum equipment.
to Science by gator |
| Friday Nov 9, 2001 | While the phenomenon (and danger) of Global Warming is generally accepted by the scientific community, there is fierce debate on expensive tactics to dampen its impact. The Ultimax Group proposes the radical and tantalizing idea of employing 390,000 square kilometers of space mirrors, placed in non-Keplerian orbits around
the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, to intercept enough (~0.25%) sunlight to offset global warming and concomitant rapid climate change.
to Science by pjammer |
| Thursday Nov 1, 2001 |
Who says physicists don't have a
sense of humor?
(albeit an obscure one) In addition to the well-known
whimsical naming
of "quarks", physicsts seem to go out of their way to make
jokes in the titles of their papers. Late nights in the lab have
spanwed such smirking titles as
Raiders of the Lost AdS,
Brane New World (by Stephen Hawking, no less),
*-Wars Episode I: The Phantom
Anomaly,
*-Trek III: The Search for
Ramond-Ramond Couplings,
How Bob Laughlin Tamed
the Giant Graviton from Taub-NUT space,
Curvature Singularities:
The Good, the Bad and the Naked,
Don't Panic! Closed String
Tachyons in ALE Spacetimes
and
Invasion of the Giant
Gravitons from Anti-de Sitter Space.
The grandaddy of all this goofing around might be the 1931 "spoof paper"
(co-written by Nobel Prize winner Hans Bethe)
"Remarks
on the quantum theory of the absolute zero of temperature", which poked
fun at numerology and fellow physics giant
Arthur Eddington's
well-known
obsession with the number 137.
(I told you the humor was obscure).
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Thursday Sep 27, 2001 | Apparently, everyone knows that Nostradamus predicted it, but I found it odd that random number generators may have predicted it, as well.
to Science by brainwave |
| Wednesday Aug 29, 2001 | Think the weather has been a little crazy lately? It has. to Science by borges |
| Friday Aug 3, 2001 | A chimpanzee in a dress can open a can with a screwdriver... eventually.
to Science by ron2112 |
| Wednesday Aug 1, 2001 | NASA and the
Mars Society
are investigating
what it would be like to
build and
maintain a base in the hostile Mars environment.
Insuring that you have heat and food are well and good, but what about
networking issues
on the red planet?
Thank god the
IETF is on
the job.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Sunday Jul 29, 2001 |
Amateur rocketry: it's more
than just Estes models and
class-D engines.
The dedicated hobbyists at
aRocket have built a
test facility
and a powerful
liquid oxygen engine
all for about the cost of a used car. to Science by riotnrrd |
| Thursday Jul 26, 2001 | Modern science has finally developed a theory to explain Geriatric Migration. to Science by nucleus |
| Monday Jul 16, 2001 | The FBI won't protect us from alien invasions. A good PR job will. to Science by mercaptan |
| Sunday Jul 1, 2001 | NASA plans exploration of outer planets and moons with huge balloons. Jules Verne would be proud.
to Science by skallas |
| Saturday Jun 30, 2001 | Now placing bets on the next Fungus of the Month. to Science by keiths |
| Thursday Jun 7, 2001 | Grand Illusions
has some interesting optical illusions and home science experiments
as well as informative essays on art and science.
to Science by borges |
| Tuesday Jun 5, 2001 | You
can
do
many
things
with
magnets. to Science by nucleus |
| Wednesday May 30, 2001 | It is no secret that our culture is accelerating. Not long ago one could get all the required asses kicked the old-fashioned way, but the times they are a changin', and so it was only a matter of time before the first fully automatic ass-kicker would appear. to Science by wheezer |
| Saturday May 19, 2001 | Ever wanted to know when you should move your illegal outdoor activities indoors when The Man's eye in the sky flies by? With J-Track, find out what's passing overhead at this very moment. to Science by saucy |
| Monday May 7, 2001 |
Jearl Walker discusses
physics and psychology of dipping your fingers into molten lead.
to Science by gator |
| Sunday Apr 22, 2001 | Globules in space! Globules from Mars! Supernatural globules! Homeopathic globules! Globules in our schools!
Even globules in our milk ! Globules!
to Science by saucy |
| Monday Apr 9, 2001 | Alternative fuels aren't just for hippies and wack jobs any more. You can run your car on old fast food oil or other grease, or just race under the sun... to Science by fringehead |
| Thursday Mar 22, 2001 |
Good god! I've heard enough
about the Mir
de-orbit
saga. I'd rather
read about studies of
what
happens when things hit planets.
to Science by gator |
| Lots of scientists acknowledge the threat that global warming poses to life as we know it. But now some researchers are beginning to think about the big chill instead. Seems that 600 million years ago, the Earth got so cold it just froze over. The thing is, without this global deep freeze, you and I might not be here at all. to Science by therubal |
| Friday Mar 16, 2001 | The perils and pleasures of applying statistics to government, science,
and death.
to Science by gator |
| Wednesday Feb 28, 2001 | Did you feel today's earthquake in Seattle? It was recorded on this seismogram and mapped on this Iris interactive Seismic Monitor. It surprised me to learn that earthquakes have their own sounds, too. to Science by eclipse |
| Wednesday Feb 21, 2001 | Learn about sonic booms from PBS and if you're still confused you can see one at NASA. Still confused? Read up on the Prandtl-Glauert Singularity or just put the cool pictures up as desktop wallpaper. to Science by skallas |
| Thursday Feb 15, 2001 | Atom optics uses light to reflect, refract and focus extremely cold matter, rather than the other way around. Very cool stuff -- literally. to Science by sylvar |
| Thursday Feb 8, 2001 | Someday it will be practical to record and
play back
brain functions. Second-hand perceptions, memories, and dreams
will will revolutionize education and
entertainment. Yes, porn too. Ironically,
alt.binaries.experiences.sex will never truly become popular-- only a
handful of hardcore fans will bother spending the bandwidth to
download yet another two-minute
masturbation memory. On the other hand, the RIAA will be more apoplectic than
ever. They will work even harder to quash unlicensed memories
of recorded works and legalize drugs that block consumers' ability
to remember
things for very long. "Free thinkers" will rebel, and the ensuing
battle will ravage legal and ethical systems around the world. The
fallout won't settle until long after someone develops a mass-produceable
memory protection technology, but by then the planet's complex
social ecology will have been irreparably damaged. The end.
to Science by braino |
| Sunday Feb 4, 2001 | Who cares about the Mars "face" anymore now that we've got heart shaped craters and smiley faced craters.
to Science by skallas |
| Wednesday Jan 31, 2001 | Russia's Salyut 1 was
the first space station put into orbit, on April 19, 1971, losing a few cosmonauts
before deorbiting into the Pacific Ocean in October. Skylab lasted from
1973 to 1979, raining debris across the Indian Ocean and Western Australia when
it crashed to Earth. Hanging over our heads these days is Mir, expected to crash on March 6th, 2001 and the
much-touted third brightest object in the night sky (after the Moon and Venus), the $100
billion
International
Space Station. The
ISS has a little-publicized projected lifespan of 15 to 20
years, after which the orbit will decay and it will hopefully not land on
anyone you know. [sigh] The future's not what it used to be.
to Science by cricket |
| I've been getting a lot more attention from cute chicks ever since I learnd about the electron band structure in Germanium. to Science by peterb |
| Tuesday Jan 23, 2001 | Just how much electricity is California
actually using? to Science by skyhook |
| Friday Jan 19, 2001 | Light pollution joins its older sibling noise pollution as a subsector of environmentalist concern. But while noise pollution affects everyone who's not deaf, the only people who tend to care about light pollution are astronomers, amateur or otherwise. But if you've never seen the details of the Milky Way in a dark country night sky, then you don't know what you're missing for the lack of very simple engineering and efficiency improvements. Perhaps California can't get enough electricity because they're dumping half their outdoor lighting into outer space. Perhaps in hopes of attracting moth-like aliens? to Science by arkuat |
| Wednesday Jan 17, 2001 | In the spirit of the
Viridian Meter,
you can calculate your ecological footprint
using a web-based calculator from
Redefining Progress.
to Science by xrayjones |
| Tuesday Jan 16, 2001 | What is IT? Neither the breakthrough single by Faith No More nor that eclectic band from Gainesville seem to offer an acceptable answer to me. Although IT is code-named Ginger, as in Spice, I think it's safe to assume what IT is not. In light of the recent media frenzy over Ginger, Dean Kamen, President and owner of DEKA Research & Development Corporation, has gone on record to suggest that the media hype surrounding his invention may be unwarranted. But, Kamen offers no suggestions about IT to lead me to any sort of conclusion. I guess I'll just have to wait to buy the book.
to Science by rich |
| Thursday Jan 11, 2001 | Physical resemblences aside, Bruce Sterling isn't apt to be confused with perpetual Hollywood Squares guest Bruce Vilanch anytime soon. While Vilanch may be reknowned in some circles for his comedic stylings on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards show, Sterling is a member of the cyberpunk literary genre who published the seminal guide to hacker culture: "Hacker Crackdown". In 1998, he delivered a now famous speech that launched the Viridian movement -- dedicated to promoting a radical environmentally-conscious theory of industrial design inspired by Viridian's 'Cybergreen' beliefs.
to Science by rich |
| Saturday Dec 23, 2000 | December 25 is the birthday of one of the most important people in history -- Sir Isaac Newton. Happy Newtonmas!
to Science by tregoweth |
| Thursday Dec 14, 2000 | Sure, watching a meteor shower (like the current Geminid shower) can be fun, but listening to one? to Science by kapital |
| Monday Dec 4, 2000 | Finally, science comes through for us: Monkey Brains. to Science by dha |
| Friday Nov 17, 2000 | When you look at
the sky at
night, thank your
lucky (ahem)
stars
that we live in a
relatively
dust-free part of
the galaxy. This
empty volume around
us, out to about 100
light-years in every direction, is
called
the Local Bubble.
Without this
Bubble, it would
be unlikely
that we could see as many stars as we can. This good fortune is
somewhat mitigated, however, by the fact that our sun is further
encased in a small dust cloud, called the
Local
Fluff.
Astronomers
can be so
cute!
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Sunday Oct 29, 2000 | Spring forward, fall back:
Daylight Savings Time
confuses, enrages, and plunges
Trick-or-Treaters
in the dark. It breaks
computers.
It
saves
lives
in the fall, only to
take
them
back
in the spring.
At least it wasn't involved in the correlation between
the
dog star Sirius
and
the
sinking of the Titanic.
Should we abolish
the
conspiracy
today?
to Science by nelson |
| Thursday Oct 26, 2000 | Your local forecast: Blazing
plasma fire is raining down upon you at over 620 kilometers per
second. Visit HAARP, the High
frequency Active Auroral Research Program, regularly if you're worried
that Earth's geomagnetic
field might not be able to ward off certain death. Have a nice
day!
to Science by braino |
| Tuesday Oct 24, 2000 | Want to win a million dollars
by proving that minesweeper
can (or can't) be solved in polynomial time? The Clay
Mathematics Institute offers this challenge along with seven others in its hopes
to popularize mathematics.
to Science by laurel |
| So I was thinking, hey, a
cubic
inch of
gold
would look pretty good on
my shelf. How much would that cost?
Answer:
Gold weighs 19.3 grams/cc.
A
cubic inch is 16.4 cc.
There are
31.1 grams in an ounce
-- those are
troy ounces,
remember.
And, as I write this, the
plain-metal
("spot")
price of gold is
$270.50 per ounce.
(A
bit more
as
coins
or
ingots.)
Multiply it out, and my little paperweight would cost about
$2750.
Which is, weirdly, almost exactly the same price as
another little cubical paperweight...
(with
sexy display).
to Science by belford |
| Friday Oct 13, 2000 | Buckminster Fuller isn't just known for his breakthrough and original ideas in architecture but for huge three-wheeled cars, a new way to shower, the one-piece bathroom, completely to-scale maps, and founding the World Game Institute. More information can be found at the Fuller FAQ. to Science by skallas |
| Wednesday Oct 11, 2000 | 20 ways the people at Discover.com think the world could end. My favorite, and the most likely, has to be mass insanity. to Science by skallas |
| Friday Sep 29, 2000 | Volcanos
can be
scary,
but
SUPER-volcanos
are
SUPER-scary.
Erupting with a force thousands of times greater than
an ordinary volcanic eruption, a supervolcano can cover an
entire continent hip-deep in ash.
Indeed, the
Toba supervolcano eruption (in modern Sumatra) 74,000
years ago
nearly drove mankind
to extinction, creating a genetic bottleneck
that is still evident in our mitochondrial DNA.
As a side note, one of the world's most regularly
active supervolcanos,
located in lovely
Yellowstone National Park, is
long overdue for an explosion. to Science by riotnrrd |
| Sunday Sep 17, 2000 | I like environmentally friendly power, like nuclear energy to Science by mpc |
| Wednesday Sep 13, 2000 | The Physics Chanteuse.
Mmm, edutainment! to Science by tregoweth |
| Thursday Aug 31, 2000 | Space debris that survives reentry is a scary thing. Luckily, no one's been killed, but someone has been hit. to Science by skallas |
| Tuesday Aug 29, 2000 | MathWorld is a fantastic interactive
encyclopedia devoted to a variey of topics such as
Discrete Math,
Calculus,
and Statistics.
The author of the site is Encyclopedist
Eric Weisstein, who has contributed to a variety of other neat
projects.
to Science by laurel |
| Thursday Aug 24, 2000 | Flying Alien Rods are everywhere! But they can't be seen. Except in the occasional frame of high-speed photography. Incredibly intelligent diaphonous beings, Rods have avoided detection for millenia by cleverly disguising themselves as film emulsion scratches and bugs and teeth. to Science by jon |
| Looking for a place to get your voodoo supplies online? Well, search no more because Boneroom is here. If picking and choosing your ingredients is too much for you, you can buy ready-made voodoo kits. Apparrently, voodoo has even helped D'Angelo.
to Science by rampage |
| Wednesday Aug 23, 2000 | A sobering image for those of you who fly often. It is, however, comforting to know that planes are designed to survive such an inevitability and that pilots train for them. to Science by gen |
| Tuesday Aug 22, 2000 | The Extropy Institute - Don't die, live forever. to Science by kade |
| Saturday Aug 19, 2000 | Britney Spears guide to Semiconductor Physics. Baby zap me one more time. to Science by dnm |
| Saturday Aug 12, 2000 | Why only pseudoskeptics take CSICOP seriously, as exposed by ex-CSICOP officer Dennis Rawlins when investigating the controversial Mars Effect. to Science by skallas |
| Thursday Aug 10, 2000 | Facial surgery helps transsexuals "pass" from the neck up, with sometimes amazing and, lets face it, sexy results. Here's some of the same procedures with less dramatic results and photos that show the interim healing process. to Science by skallas |
| Sunday Aug 6, 2000 | Challenge scientific materialism in your spare time with this remote psychokineses experiment hosted by the Koestler Parapsychology Unit. to Science by skallas |
| Wednesday Aug 2, 2000 | The bacteria
Deinococcus
Radiodurans
lives happily in the cooling water of
nuclear reactors. Take that,
cockroaches. to Science by riotnrrd |
| Thursday Jul 20, 2000 | Color psychology is a branch of psychology that deals with the emotional properties of various colors. Dr. Max Lüscher designed a surprisingly accurate personality test based on color preference, although there are also more practical uses. to Science by kier |
| Monday Jul 10, 2000 | On my vacation, I visited The Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center. It was neat to see all the different sea turtles and to hear of their successes. to Science by keith |
| Tuesday Jul 4, 2000 | Movies like "Blink" and "At First Sight" gave us a fictional inkling of how surgery might be used to help a blind person see. Optobionics has begun to turn this fictional idea into a reality by being the first to implant artificial retinas (made of silicon chips) into blind
patients. Bring on the Diamond Age. to Science by laurel |
| Thursday Jun 29, 2000 | The logical converse of "invisible insects" would, of course, be
bacteria
big enough to see with the naked eye.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Tuesday Jun 27, 2000 | The annual ACM
SIGGRAPH conference is taking
place next month in lovely
New Orleans. Graphics nerds
such as myself
should take a moment off from their preparations and enjoy some
SIGGRAPH humor.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Monday Jun 26, 2000 | Brian Walker, AKA Rocket Guy, is using the money he has made inventing toys to fulfill his childhood dream of building a rocket and launchpad in his backyard and launching himself 30 miles into space. The launch is scheduled for April, 2001, but until then he has images and a movie of a computer-simulated launch. to Science by kapital |
| Tuesday Jun 13, 2000 | While you're waiting for your
seti@home
client to find those damn
aliens already, you can pass the time by trying to decipher a
synthetic alien
message created by the good folks at the (somewhat optimistically
named)
Lunar Institute of
Technology.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Monday Jun 5, 2000 | Do you consistently experience letters as certain colors, or certian textures or tastes? You may have synesthesia, which basically means the blending of two or more senses. People with synesthesia generally have it from childhood on, tend to be highly intelligent and artistic, and most of them experience synesthesia as pefectly normal.
to Science by idat |
| Tuesday May 30, 2000 | So, hey - scientists are clever. We knew that. But
FTL light? These guys have apparently figured out a way to get a beam of light to exit a container before it enters.
Not exactly Warp Drive, but it's a start.
to Science by caviar |
| Friday May 26, 2000 | Mosquito Bay in Vieques, Puerto Rico is known as the World's Brightest Bioluminescent Bay. The eerie light is due to the presence of Pyrodinium bahamense, a type of plankton known as a dinoflagellate. Once you check out these nifty long-exposure photos, you might be tempted to grow them at home. to Science by obvious |
| Tuesday May 23, 2000 | "The Metamath Proof Explorer has 60 MBytes of interconnected web pages containing over 3000 completely worked out proofs in logic and set theory." Then again, how often does one need the axiom of choice?
to Science by joshua |
| Wednesday May 17, 2000 | Jessica Bayliss is doing
some fascinating
research with brain-computer interfaces that can help paralyzed people use household
applicances with a mere
thought. to Science by laurel |
| Monday May 15, 2000 | Lab Safety sells everything a careful mad scientist needs, including Hazardous Material suits and scary Biohazard signs. to Science by joshua |
| Friday May 12, 2000 | What kind of Intergalactic Explorer are you? to Science by jason |
| Wednesday May 10, 2000 | Ever wonder what manatee tastes like? I have. Manatee tastes like pork, beef, fish, and tortoise; and its best served DEEP FRIED.
to Science by rampage |
| Saturday May 6, 2000 | NASA discovers metallic dog bone-shaped asteroid; could MST3K be real?
to Science by riffraff |
| Sunday Apr 30, 2000 | I'm was unsurprised to run across a Molecule of the Month page (and I enjoyed finding the page of molecules with silly or unusual names). But I was a little surprised to learn that there are a total of five Molecule
of
the
Month pages.
to Science by keith |
| Thursday Apr 27, 2000 | What better way to round out your day than with a few psychological tests! Find out how biased, smart, or insane you are. to Science by kier |
| Wednesday Apr 26, 2000 | Ordinary people
lose ordinary stuff.
Astronomers, however, sometimes
lose
whole moons.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Monday Apr 10, 2000 | Finally! I can look at non-objectified hot chicks while doing my calculus assignment! Wait...is that a good thing? to Science by succa |
| Friday Apr 7, 2000 | "The sun is a mass of incandescent gas..." Who wrote it?
BZZZZT! WRONG!
Hy
Zaret
and Lou Singer, that's who -- already world-famous
for their hit ballad,
"One Meatball".
Back in
1975,
I was already listening to
"Why
Does the Sun Shine?"
and other
Ballads
For The Age Of Science.
The albums were fifteen years old then,
and I played them
on a horrible little record player whose stylus
was probably made of
tin.
And that's why I'm the dot-com millionaire I am today.
to Science by belford |
| Thursday Mar 30, 2000 | Popularized by
Arthur C. Clarke
in his classic novel
"The Fountains of Paradise,"
a space elevator
(also known as a "beanstalk") is basically a
big
cable that stretches from the Earth's surface to
geosynchronous orbit.
Why the hell would you want to do this? Well, for one thing
it would make putting things in orbit extremely cheap.
Problems,
however, are legion. It's uncertain whether
any foreseeable
material is even
theoretically strong enough to support the weight of this enormous cable
(although
active materials and
buckytubes hold
promise).
Furthermore, the elevator would sweep
a path through near-Earth orbits,
further
crowding orbital space.
And what would happen if the cable broke, and thousands of miles of
ultrastrong cable
slammed into the
Earth at orbital velocities?
However, if we don't insist on our elevator reaching all the way from
the ground to orbit, it becomes
more realistic.
For example, an
orbital tether
could be used to bridge the gap between "high altitute" and "near space"
and provide not only a cheaper route to orbit, but also a
zero-gee tourist spot.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Tuesday Mar 14, 2000 | As if any further
evidence
was needed that the
U.S. Patent Office needs
a crunchy beating, someone has patented a
"device"
which is
completely physically impossible.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Sunday Mar 12, 2000 | When I was in Las Cruces, New Mexico, I was struck not only by the beauty of the Chihuahuan desert, but how different it was from my conception of the desert in general. DesertUSA has lots of interesting and informative information about the North American Deserts. to Science by peterb |
| Friday Mar 3, 2000 | Unfortunately, they're not discovering new animal species as fast as we're making them extinct. to Science by larrybob |
| Thursday Mar 2, 2000 | The European Southern Observatory operates various Very Large Telescopes to produce images rivalling those of HST. Look at the dust-lane detail in this shot of the Sombrero Galaxy to see what I mean. to Science by obvious |
| Friday Feb 25, 2000 | Hey, you want really old electrical equipment? Try Minneapolis' Bakken Museum, which has electrical devices used for medical purposes going back to the 18th century. to Science by larrybob |
| Mike's Electric Stuff
contains pictures and descriptions of obsolete
electric
glassware,
high-voltage devices
and
random cool
electronics stuff.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Wednesday Feb 16, 2000 | Make our commutes better. Study the physics of traffic waves, including merging and simulating traffic light timing (with Java). For the humanities majors, read the principles of driving psychology. to Science by enigma |
| Wednesday Feb 9, 2000 | Originally scheduled for Januray, 1999,
NEAR will
rendezvous
with asteroid 433 Eros on Valentine's day. Well, unless
something goes wrong again. But at least NEAR is in the hands of Johns Hopkins and not NASA.
to Science by arkuat |
| Sunday Feb 6, 2000 | Activist groups are up in arms about dihydrogen
monoxide. Some say it's
dangerous and risky to use. Others, of
course, disagree. to Science by tregoweth |
| Saturday Feb 5, 2000 | Not all
sharks are
flesh-crazed
killers. Most, in fact, are harmless, like the enormous
whale shark
and the rare (and evidently tasty)
megamouth.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Thursday Jan 27, 2000 | Thanks to NASA, we now know what happens if you pop a water balloon in outer space, and other experimental results in microgravity. to Science by larrybob |
| Friday Jan 21, 2000 | Snow Crystals covers the history of snowflakes, explains how to make designer snowflakes and provides an in-depth discussion of snowflake physics. to Science by joshua |
| I love to watch eclipses, but nobody is more devoted to them Fred Espenak, Mr. Eclipse himself. He's even got a great collection of eclipse stamps. And if you're fascinated with things beyond our chunk of rock, you'll enjoy Views of the Solar System as well. Pictures of Saturn also make great desktops! to Science by eclipse |
| Wednesday Jan 19, 2000 | Nanobes
are the smallest known living thing, measuring only 20 to 100 nanometers
in size. Discovered in 1996, nanobes are still largely a mystery.
Make sure to look at the
high-resolution
microscopy images at the
discovering lab's
website.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Breaking news about the ancient world. to Science by birgitte |
| Friday Jan 14, 2000 | On the cutting edge of technology: Improved Methods for Transportation of Hunted Animals, using a new tool called a "wheel". to Science by kapital |
| The end of the world^H^H^H^H^Hgalaxy is at hand! to Science by faisal |
| Saturday Jan 1, 2000 | Think humans should go to Mars? Then get off your
e-butt and do what little you can by signing the
Mars Petition. The desired outcome is a human mission to Mars
in 2015. You might also check out the Mars Society
for more info on Mars advocacy. to Science by xrayjones |
| Friday Dec 24, 1999 | December 25 is the birthday of one of the most important
people in history --
Sir Isaac Newton.
Happy Newtonmas!
to Science by tregoweth |
| Tuesday Dec 21, 1999 | Enough with the interesting stuff. Sociology has too long over looked mundane behavior. to Science by keith |
| Friday Dec 17, 1999 | Space science is one of the biggest casulaties of the collapse of the Soviet Union, in particular,
the Buran, the Soviet
space shuttle, never got past the testing stage. The page, incidentally, is from
Encyclopedia Astronautica, a fairly beefy collection of links on space travel in general. Check out the seriously huge
list of cancelled spaceflights in particular. to Science by mpc |
| Thursday Dec 16, 1999 | Prions are infectious agents with no associated genetic (nucleic acid) material. How then did they develop? With such a definition, their very existence is still controversial. Yet they are already being shoehorned into the taxonomy as "subviral". to Science by arkuat |
| Friday Dec 10, 1999 | You can keep up to date on current volcanic activity and read about volcano adventures but you can no longer Ask A Volcanologist at Volcano World. to Science by keith |
| Tuesday Dec 7, 1999 | Explore special relativity with this Twin Paradox applet. to Science by arkuat |
| Thursday Dec 2, 1999 | If you're tall, you may want to celebrate the first dawn of the year 2000 by standing on Cadillac Mountain in Maine's Acadia National Park, because your head may then have the honor of being the first thing in the US to be hit by direct sunlight on that momentous morning. to Science by goboro |
| Tuesday Nov 16, 1999 | If you have $6 US per month to blow, Weathertap has some pretty sexy up-to-the-minute weather imagery for you. to Science by fringehead |
| Wednesday Nov 10, 1999 | Need a lobotomy? to Science by keith |
| Thursday Nov 4, 1999 | People keep asking me if yeast is plant or animal (and therefore vegan or not),
to I normally reply is "It's as much not-animal as plants are."
That usually confuses them long enough to let me
slip away, but these days I'll just point them
to the
Tree of Life, which includes a browsable
hierarchy of
taxa with references and pictures. to Science by xrayjones |
| Wednesday Oct 27, 1999 | If you really want to recycle paper, as
Beakman and Jax suggest, you're going to run into the problem that your paper, which starts out grey, gets even darker if you try to recycle it again, and then darker still. That's why, in the real world, there is deinking. However, that requires certain enzymes and cannot be done at home in your kitchen, but rather in large
industrial plants. to Science by keith |
| Thursday Oct 21, 1999 | The Mystic Aquarium
rescued, tagged and
released
some
pilot
whales into the wild and now you can
track them
on-line.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Saturday Oct 16, 1999 | Although long thought to be
nonexistant,
it now appears that there may indeed be a
tenth planet,
a vastly distant
brown
dwarf with three times the mass of Jupiter.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Friday Oct 15, 1999 | For those of you curious about Blackouts, this is your site! to Science by mpc |
| Monday Oct 11, 1999 | Even if you don't live in
San Francisco
or
Los Angeles, you're
still not safe from earthquakes.
One of the
potentially
most deadly faultlines in the
U.S. -- the
New Madrid fault
-- runs right through the seismically unprepared midwest. to Science by riotnrrd |
| According to UN estimates, the human population will reach six billion on October 12, 1999. The World Population Clock counts down (or up, as it were) to six billion. Hardcore eco-activists are using 10-12-99 as a mediagenic opportunity to voice their concerns - but not everyone believes that six billion humans is bad news. Population researcher Frank Furedi's informative essay Six Billion People? Three Cheers offers an optimistic alternative to the grim Malthusian perspective we hear so much about.
to Science by pjammer |
| Thursday Oct 7, 1999 | Wolfgang Pauli
once said about another scientist's theory that
"it's not even wrong." This withering put-down has
been adopted by folks who oppose
pathological
science, also known as
pseudo-science
or
junk science.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Monday Oct 4, 1999 | The popular media often gets its science and astronomy
wrong.
Very,
very wrong.
Here to save the day from ignorance are Phil Platt's
Bad Astronomy
and Alistair Fraser's
Bad Science
websites.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Thursday Sep 30, 1999 | Yes, it's the toilet
from the space shuttle. Specially designed because you don't want
tinky and
poo-poo
floating around when you're in outer space. to Science by moose |
| Tuesday Sep 28, 1999 | Aerogel
is a very fine glassine substance used
to make detectors for
particle physicsexperiments.
Apart from their funky
physical properties, alternative
uses, they just
just
looks
cool.
Unfortunately, while manufacturers
exist, they're still a bit pricey.
to Science by mpc |
| Monday Sep 27, 1999 | The Museum of the History of Science in Florence has a roomful of the relics of Galileo Galilei. And I don't just mean lenses and lodestones. I mean genuine relics. to Science by belford |
| Sunday Sep 26, 1999 | Ever wonder what a vodka gimlet looks like up close? I mean, really up close? Enjoy the
photomicroscopy of cocktails. to Science by crikey |
| Monday Sep 20, 1999 | The United States Geological Survey maintains a very near realtime bulletin of current seismic activity, with a spectacular array of interpretations of the data. Take for example today's Taiwan earthquake, for which waveform data is available. Also worthy is WILBER (Web Interface to Lookup Big Events for Retrieval) which is a usable interface to all the near realtime seismic data available online.
to Science by urog |
| Saturday Sep 18, 1999 | The near future of rocket propulsion looks interesting.
Chemical rockets, of
course, will remain important for a while, but within a few dedacdes
we could have much more efficient
nuclear "teakettle" rockets
somewhat like the old
NERVA engines.
Ultimately, however, the future belongs to
fusion.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Thursday Sep 16, 1999 | Love-o-meter? Love Calculator? Okay, so "science" is stretching it some... to Science by djinn |
| Monday Sep 6, 1999 | NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day has some really cool pictures, including a picture of the Earth during the last solar eclipse. to Science by faisal |
| Thursday Sep 2, 1999 | No doubt the
GEX Handbook
is intended for serious industrial engineers studying vapor deflagrations
at process plants.
But it's all about
Things
going fooooom, dude.
to Science by belford |
| Friday Aug 27, 1999 | What's the fastest way to get to Titan? Why,
a
nuclear salt water rocket of course! This and
other short essays on cutting-edge science can be
found in the Alternate View columns
of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. to Science by xrayjones |
| Wednesday Aug 25, 1999 | Don't have a science museum nearby?
Relax, you can always just use
The Cyberspace Museum of Natural History and
Exploration Technology. It is probably not as good for school field trips, but otherwise nifty. to Science by keith |
| Thursday Aug 19, 1999 | Antimatter
storage and
interstellar
spaceships?
This isn't science fiction, but rather NASA
funded studies of
advanced concepts
in aeronautics and space.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Since we're not radioactive dust, here's some
information on Cassini,
and here's some people who spent an awful
lot of time
worrying about it. These people
were worried too, but they're weird to Science by mpc |
| Tuesday Aug 17, 1999 | Carolina Biological Supply
satsifies all of your
preserved animal and
owl poo.
needs.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Monday Aug 16, 1999 | Grow up, would ya? to Science by succa |
| Friday Aug 13, 1999 | Mad scientists really do exist.
Paul Pietsch at Indiana University
has performed some head
transplants, limb grafts,
and other sorts of strange things to
Axolotls.
to Science by laurel |
| Wednesday Aug 11, 1999 | Unless you just happened to be in the right place in Europe this morning, the only way to catch the last eclipse of this millenium was to log in to the website of local science museums for the live webcast. The world's coolest science museum also offered an all-night "eclipse party" where this memepool contributor witnessed totality alongside a thousand cheering science geeks. to Science by pjammer |
| Tuesday Aug 10, 1999 | In spite of overwhelming evidence against the possibility of a functional perpetual-motion machine, human history is nonetheless filled with determined wackos in grim pursuit of the ultimate thermodynamic free lunch. to Science by pjammer |
| Wednesday Aug 4, 1999 | What would it look like if you
fell into a
black hole?
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Monday Jul 26, 1999 | Starshine is a "small, optically reflective spheroid" launched from Space Shuttle Discovery in June 1999. This mirror-covered satellite is naked-eye visible after dark to folks between the latitudes of 60 degrees North and 60 degrees South.
The GSOC Satellite Predictions page allows you to enter your home latitude and longitude and get information about when and where Starshine might be visible to you. It also gives the current position of Starshine, as well as 10-day predictions for Mir, ISS, Columbia, and Iridium Flares, among lots of other things. to Science by eclipse |
| Friday Jul 23, 1999 | Make your own
mucus! This page adheres to the philosophy that you can never have
too much snot. You can also use it to make hairballs
without all that tedious licking and vomiting. You don't even need a
cat!
to Science by braino |
| Thursday Jul 22, 1999 | BNL is a bit
irate
about speculation that the RHIC
could blow up the planet largely because the multi-GeV
energies used by a collider are considerably less powerful than
gnats
coughing. Still, if you're worried, you might
want to check out the RHIC
design manual
to find out what's going on. If it doesn't make
sense,
this
might help.
to Science by mpc |
| I've often been morbidly fascinated by Iron Lungs,
now I've found a
museum about them! to Science by mpc |
| Thursday Jul 15, 1999 | The best explanation I've seen for the oft-bungled question: "Why is the sky dark at night?". And oooh, the Java usage! to Science by succa |
| Wednesday Jul 14, 1999 | In 1901, Greek sponge-divers found an ancient shipwreck off the coast of
Antikythera which contained the remains of a
geared
mechanism over two thousand years old.
Archaeologists and scientists now believe it was a device for calculating
the motions of stars and planets: a primitive analog computer.
The
implications
for our understanding of ancient history are potentially enormous.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Sunday Jul 11, 1999 | How old is the universe? What's the shape of space-time?
Ned Wright's
Cosmology Tutorial has the answers to the really
big questions.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Saturday Jul 10, 1999 | The Incredible
Five-Cent Sugar Rocket is 35KB worth of serious model rocketry
instructions. These babies are supposed to reach 300 feet, and making
them requires a serious time and attention commitment. Don't
tell your parents where you found this, okay?
to Science by braino |
| Monday Jun 21, 1999 | While not as useful to my plans for world domination as I had hoped, Documentation
and Diagrams of the Atomic Bomb is a well-witten, all-text, ASCII-illustrated history/
construction overview of nuclear weapons. to Science by pjammer |
| Southern Californians now can see the state of their beaches and ocean at Heal The Bay. The Beach Report Card is handy for knowing which beaches (from Santa Barbara to Orange County) are clean and which are not. Even if you're not in SoCal, you can learn how to lessen your impact on your coastal waters and beaches.
to Science by gen |
| Tuesday Jun 15, 1999 | High atop Mauna Kea on Hawaii are Keck and Subaru, two of the best ground-based observatories on Earth. Check out cool hi-res images of the Orion Nebula, Jupiter and Saturn. Keck's Photo Gallery is beautiful too. It is strangely beautiful outside the observatory as well.
to Science by gen |
| Sunday Jun 13, 1999 | The lengths some people will go to just to sell you
a mirror:
"What Is Your
Hair Part Saying About You?: The Effects of
Hair Parting on Social Appraisal and Personal Development." to Science by tregoweth |
| Monday May 24, 1999 | The latest entry in my Great Ideas That Will Never Be Implemented
file: The
Twenty-Eight-Hour Day.
to Science by sck |
| Wednesday May 19, 1999 | Believe it or not, there's a government agency
for searching for little green men (or ancient nanobacteria, as the
case may be). You can even
ask an astrobiologist about your extraterrestrial lifeform conundrums.
to Science by xrayjones |
| Saturday May 15, 1999 | One of the most influential meme-machines in the
modern Christian memepool is the
crypto-scientific organization
Creation Research Institute - which spends a
great deal of time trying to convince the scientific
community that the earth is really only 6500 years old.
For those interested in a more thoughtful analysis
of some of the existing problems with the
conventional Darwinian model, point your browser
to Darwin's
Mistake.
to Science by pjammer |
| Thursday May 13, 1999 | Have you seen strange moving lights in the night sky lately?
They're not UFOs, but rather so-called
Iridium
flares,
flashes of light reflected from the 60+
Iridium
satellites now in orbit around the Earth.
To find out exactly when these satellites (and many others) are
overhead, consult the
German Space Operations Center's
satellite finder to Science by riotnrrd |
| From the world's greatest desktop wallpaper department comes the Astronomy Picture of the Day. Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. to Science by bklyn |
| Friday May 7, 1999 | "Find
Your Star Wars Twin": The Star Wars
personality test. to Science by tregoweth |
| Thursday May 6, 1999 | The Bell Labs speech synthesizer has eight different voices, but you have to be old enough to hear them.
to Science by rsf |
| For the ultra paranoid, a way of knowing what's flying over your head right now.
to Science by rsf |
| Thursday Apr 29, 1999 | Forget Tamagotchi, breed Biomorphs to Science by mpc |
| Tuesday Apr 27, 1999 | An
old essay
written by
Freeman
Dyson discusses what the fate of
the universe (and us) might be if it is open, rather than closed.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Sunday Apr 25, 1999 | The Hedonistic Imperative is a wildly optimistic organization convinced that humanity is on the cusp of a revolution of consciousness. For within a few generations, celestial chemistry of a loveliness that transcends any fantasised Christian afterlife will become the genetically-coded basis of our existence. Me, I won't believe it until I am on my private island with my Jeri Ryan simulacrum and her clone triplet sisters.
to Science by pjammer |
| Monday Apr 19, 1999 | A View From the Back of the
Envelope is devoted to the joys of approximation and educated guessing.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Sunday Apr 18, 1999 | The famous powers of ten
illustrations move the viewer from the
edges of the universe
to the smallest known
particles in 42 power-of-ten steps.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Friday Apr 16, 1999 | A pretty
underground ping pong ball lined inside with
13,000 photodetectors and filled ultrapure
water, the
Super-Kamoikande has produced
some
evidence that neutrinos have mass!
It may be time to revise the
textbooks and think about cosmology: it has
been observed for some time that the sun
produces too few neutrinos, and this may be
a hint that the number detected was a result
of oscillations. The neutrino may be a
candidate for being missing or dark matter.
Check out the
official SuperK site for more hot neutrino
tips. OR just go straight to the
photos. to Science by oznoid |
| Wednesday Apr 14, 1999 | Fight the Man by violating the "strict press embargo" on the news of the
discovery of a triple planet
system orbiting Upsilon Andromedae.
to Science by peterb |
| Tuesday Apr 13, 1999 | Monsanto is a "life sciences" company that (among
other biologically questionable things)
genetically engineers seeds for farmers. They've been so inspired by Microsoft and the software industry's
growth that they're suing farmers engaged
in the use of harvested 2nd generation seeds for patent violation.
to Science by akk |
| Friday Apr 9, 1999 | Everyone wants to know if yawning is contagious, and it seems that there are quite a few theories. Of these theories, this one would have to be my favorite. to Science by djinn |
| Wednesday Apr 7, 1999 | Okay, you've read that Cryptonomicon essay about Linux. Rah rah. Now read
Neal Stephenson's 1996 Wired article
"Mother
Earth Mother Board", about transoceanic cables and the geeks that lay
them. Long, detailed, fascinating, and you've almost certainly touched one
in the past 24 hours, so you might as well learn a bit about them.
to Science by goboro |
| Friday Apr 2, 1999 | The Center for Human
Simulation has created the
Visible Human
Database, a collection of high-resolution color scans of
slices of the human body. Make sure to see the incredible
animation!
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Thursday Apr 1, 1999 | If you ever had a fascination with oozy creepy things and embarassing noises, you'll
enjoy the yuckiest site on the internet.
You'll excuse me. I just read about zits at
The Gross and Cool Body, and I need to wash
my face. to Science by machita |
| Wednesday Mar 31, 1999 | Redeemed, they'll soar like a glider, race
like a Stealth, and, when overflying a barnyard or kennel, turn
into a wicked-awesome dive bomber. to Science by freeside |
| For twenty years, the Sun has hung above the south pole of Uranus. The planet glowed as a
featureless, weatherless, cyan ball. But now, as the Sun crosses the planet's equator, it's
springtime on Uranus
(or autumn if you prefer). Be sure to watch the
movies. to Science by arkuat |
| Wednesday Mar 24, 1999 | 4.8 gigabytes of
images and movies of astronomical objects and spacecraft are
avialble at this French site.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Monday Mar 22, 1999 | What would happen if an asteroid
hit New York City?
For starters, Long Island would be blanketed in molten rock and superheated
steam, so maybe it's not all bad.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Friday Mar 19, 1999 | A really pretty site describing the
Theban
Mapping Project. The site details
the discovery and mapping of tomb KV5
in Egypt's Valley of the Kings (only
discovered in 1995), which has been described
by some as one of the most important
archaeological discoveries of the century.
The QTVR
movies are a nice touch. to Science by crikey |
| Monday Mar 15, 1999 | Ouch. The Anal Fissure Self-Help page. to Science by peterb |
| Friday Mar 12, 1999 | The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center provides us with a new
and interesting
anatomic pathology case each month, complete with
photographs.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Tuesday Mar 2, 1999 | Speech researchers at UPenn have compiled a
map of American dialects. This mapping is a part of the larger project
of constructing
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Fossils for sale, including
rare
invertebrates and some truly
bizarre trilobites. to Science by riotnrrd |
| Humans have downward-pointing nostrils, a dive
reflex, skin-bonded subcutaneous fat, and a
number of other peculiar traits that we share
with aquatic mammals but do not share with other
primates. The Aquatic
Ape Theory attempts to give an evolutionary
explanation of these and other traits.
Needless to say, it's controversial. to Science by arkuat |
| Saturday Feb 27, 1999 | The Rotary Rocket Company's public
display of their newly completed prototype takes place on Monday at 4pm.
Flight tests supposedly start
this year. to Science by riotnrrd |
| Thursday Feb 25, 1999 | Catch up on Elliptic Curve research,
of growing importance to the future of cryptography and an all-around swell area of number theory.
to Science by akk |
| Wednesday Feb 24, 1999 | If you had a bad day, be glad you don't deal with
these sorts of problems. Find out what went
wrong today for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's
Daily Events Report. to Science by mendel |
| Monday Feb 22, 1999 | Get one of your own experiments
flown on the Space
Shuttle. to Science by riotnrrd |
| Tuesday Feb 9, 1999 | The most thorough and interesting
reference about the
elements that I've ever seen.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Friday Jan 29, 1999 | Maybe Matt Scott is a comedian, and maybe not, but when someone said "Give that man a hand," someone else took him literally. to Science by mfp |
| Thursday Jan 28, 1999 | Let the cloning
begin!
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Monday Jan 25, 1999 | The difference between a nice salad and a nasty one may only be properly understood by
grasshoppers and the men who eat them. to Science by jacquez |
| Friday Jan 22, 1999 | Seti@Home is a project that lets internet
users use spare cycles to help look for meaningful signs of alien
life amongst SETI data, much like the distributed
efforts to find crypto keys.
to Science by faisal |
| Thursday Jan 21, 1999 | Darwin's detractors: a field guide. (Shame that neither side of the debate
knows yet who's attacking whom.) to Science by ned |
| Monday Jan 18, 1999 | The SEDS Messier
Catalog is a beautifully done and very deep
site that explores the classic, well-known deep-sky
objects cataloged by Charles Messier. This is a
good way to get an overview of the nearest, largest,
and brightest globular clusters, open clusters,
stardust clouds, "planetary nebulae" (a misnomer),
and galaxies. I wish I had several spare multihour
chunks of time to spend exploring this one. to Science by arkuat |
| More information that you ever needed to know about
calendars.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Tuesday Jan 5, 1999 | The Earth has had several near-collisions with
asteroids
and
comets.
And there's more to come, of course, so
keep watching the skies.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| The Nine Planets is a great source of info on the planets, their moons, and other gunk floating around in the solar system. It includes information on how everything was discovered and some of the mythology behind their names. to Science by nyarl |
| Wednesday Dec 23, 1998 | The Geometry Junkyard is a titanic
list of references and links to discrete and computational geometry. to Science by joshua |
| Sunday Dec 20, 1998 | Launchspace Magazine
is a space industry trade magazine filled with excellent articles and
interesting technical data. Make sure to check out the forcast of
upcoming launches and
the article on
astronaut
fatalities. Of special interest is the evidence that five
Soviet cosmonauts died in orbit before Yuri Gargarin's successful flight
in 1961.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Saturday Dec 19, 1998 | Never mind the CambridgeSoft review. Here's
Ralph Merkle's collection of resources for
computational
chemistry. Make gray goo in your garage. to Science by arkuat |
| Friday Dec 18, 1998 | Biosphere 2 seems
to have passed into the possession of Columbia
University and continues its existence as an
educational institution. No future closures are
currently planned, but the possibility remains.
The Biospherics
home page gives information about several similar
projects around the world. to Science by arkuat |
| Tuesday Dec 15, 1998 | Java seems to be interesting but useless; except for creating interesting
but useless things. Like the Java simulations of
N-body gravity and.. err..
more N-body gravity.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Wednesday Dec 9, 1998 | Either Gary Larson owns a lot of stock in Xerox, or what we have here is
cow-copying
the likes of which God has never seen.
to Science by jacquez |
| Monday Dec 7, 1998 | We've had the lovely flybys of Mathilde and
Gaspra and Ida (with Dactyl), but next month
we get the first orbital rendezvous with an
asteroid, namely 433 Eros. The web design at
Near-Earth
Asteroid Rendezvous project is not so hot,
but the mission news updates are
very detailed.
Mark your calendars for 1999 January 10 and watch
that URL.
to Science by arkuat |
| Friday Dec 4, 1998 | A recent issue of CambridgeSoft Catalyst
has a review of various molecular-modeling software
packages. Discover the drug that will make millions
for the next big pharmaceutical company in the
comfort of your own den! to Science by arkuat |
| Wednesday Nov 25, 1998 | Admit it, geek: you like math. So indulge yourself and bask in the reflected
light of infinity with information about
the largest
known primes. Afterwards, relax in the comfortable, climate-controlled
first
50,000,000 digits of pi.
to Science by riotnrrd |
| Friday Nov 13, 1998 | Rule #37 in Drug Enforcement: Don't piss off a biochemist, or he'll lace your state's largest crop with THC. to Science by nyarl |
| Thursday Nov 12, 1998 | Straight out of the Far Side, lonely scientists with a bit too much free time "generate" cow/human hybrids.
to Science by nyarl |
| Friday Nov 6, 1998 | With the recent proof of a black hole at the center of the Milky Way, astronomers are digging around the center of the galaxy, to find that it's a pretty interesting place. to Science by faisal |
| Wednesday Nov 4, 1998 | New advances allow police forensic examiners to uniquely identify masked criminals by the fading pattern on their jeans.
to Science by faisal |
| Thursday Oct 29, 1998 | Never mind Senators In Space!, NASA just
launched an unmanned spaceship powered by a new
experimental ion engine which is far more
efficient than current chemical propellant systems.
to Science by faisal |
| Coming in a week: The Iridium system goes live, providing really expensive cellular phone service to people anywhere in the world, but ending radio astronomy as we know it.
to Science by faisal |
| Wednesday Oct 21, 1998 | Simple cybernetic implants, now in testing. to Science by faisal |
| Tuesday Oct 13, 1998 | Viagra wins Nobel Prize.
Please kill me. to Science by akk |
| Friday Oct 9, 1998 | The Ig Nobel Prizes have been handed out. to Science by jason |
| Thursday Oct 8, 1998 | Have you ever wanted to Fed-Ex someone an aggressive bird-eating eleven-inch tarantula? All you need is a credit card.
to Science by joshua |
| Thursday Oct 1, 1998 | James Randi Educational Foundation --
stamping out ignorance with steel-toed boots. to Science by nyarl |
| Head like a hole! Black as your soul!
Trepanation
is the way to go! to Science by nyarl |
| "...and then...tiny surgery...we'll take his face off... to Science by nyarl |
| Friday Sep 25, 1998 |
Evolution. It's not just for bacteria anymore.
to Science by jacquez |
| There may be a use for liberal arts majors after all. to Science by jason |
| Thursday Sep 24, 1998 | Although serious consumables research has been
ongoing for some time, few laboratories are as
thorough and painstaking as the researchers at
The
T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project. to Science by jacquez |
| Wednesday Sep 23, 1998 | Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins and the meaning of "scientist" in Nature's past.
to Science by faisal |
| Sunday Sep 20, 1998 | The Australian defense forces are evaluating whether injections of caffeine,
ephedrine, and 'blood loading' might prove a shot in the arm for battlefield
soldiers. to Science by akk |
| Friday Sep 18, 1998 | Penrose tiling might be math,
but at least it makes pretty pictures.
to Science by magus |
| DOE engineers propose a crazy plan to get you from san francisco to
tokyo in under 2 hrs.
to Science by akk |
| the science of binaural beats
facilitates transcendental meditation for the average joe. no yogi required. to Science by deaner |
| Thursday Sep 17, 1998 | Hand-drawn Holograms
are not the feat of hand-eye coordination you might expect.
to Science by obvious |
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