Science writer (and science tattoo gallery curator) Carl Zimmer recently wrote an article for The New York Times about the science of Spore. He’s also linked to this video from Seed of a conversation between astrobiologist Jill Tarter and Spore creator Will Wright. Here’s a print version of the conversation.
I was a comic book fan way before I was a mom. I’ve always liked exposing my kids at an early age to simple forms of complex ideas; I think it makes concepts familiar, letting kids get comfortable with sometimes difficult topics before they’re presented with the adult, “serious” versions – comics are the perfect […]
You may think a Marx Generator is a device for spitting out strident communist rhetoric, but it’s actually a type of high-voltage circuit for spitting out HV pulses. This is probably one to put in the “Don’t Try this at Home” or “Touch = Die” file as we are dealing with current here that can […]
If we look at good-quality 1 carat diamonds, we find that they are quite expensive compared to the industrial diamonds we saw earlier. Now, the diamond monopoly hasn’t kept prices quite as high as LSD, however they are doing a very impressive job of trying. LSD doses measure in the micrograms, which makes the per-pound […]
Official shot of the complex (above). From Shawn’s Flickr set (below). Living roofs with skylights. They are heat sensitive and open automatically when they reach a certain temperature to get a breeze going inside Bloggers and Bay Area journos were invited on a behind-the-scenes, not-quite-ready-for-primetime tour of the updated Steinhart Aquarium and California Academy of […]
Peacay at BibliOdyssey has a roundup of illustrations of early microscopes. “They were incredibly small, nay so small, in my sight, that I judged that even if 100 of these very wee animals lay stretched out one against another, they could not reach to the length of a grain of coarse Sand.” [Antonie van Leeuwenhoek […]
Seed magazine has these great downloadable cribsheets about synthetic biology (Spore fans take note!), genetics, the elements, hurricanes – there are sixteen subjects so far.
