A wonder cabinet of unsettling science.
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Over at Significant Objects today, Margaret Wertheim of the admirable Institute for Figuring tells a story about an owl-shaped pincushion and its role in the discovery that Leibniz was right to reject Newton’s notion of […]
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The first sightings of dogs in trees were reported not long after the Fall equinox. Early rumor came in the form of videos shot at arms’ length on cell phones and hastily uploaded — grainy, […]
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The final paragraph of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth’s The Lurker at the Threshold (1945) describes an uncanny scene that nicely limns the Cthulhu Mythos for those of us who may as yet be unfamiliar […]
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Boston Dynamics, creators of the quadrupedal robot “BigDog,” bring you “Petman,” a robot modeled on the gait of Mr. Natural. Unlike Mr. Natural, Petman is stable when pushed. They say that the robot is designed […]
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In one version of an oft-repeated thought experiment, Douglas Hofstadter famously wondered if Albert Einstein’s brain (well, anyone’s brain, really) could be reformatted as a book, with each neuron represented by a page printed with […]
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As reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, a pair of physicists have offered a novel theory to explain the troubles bedeviling the Large Hadron Collidor, the world’s most powerful — and to date, […]
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Within the western current of occult mysticism, A. E. WAITE (1857–1942) stands out as a prototype of the modern scholar-practitioner — an initiate and seeker who was nonetheless devoted to mapping and organizing the occult […]
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Monkeys are making news across the world of science. As we discussed last week, researchers discovered that tamarin monkeys prefer music composed for them. Yesterday, Science Daily reported a study in which monkeys were found […]
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Elaine Morgan is a Welsh screen writer whose credits include Dr Finlay’s Casebook and How Green Was My Valley. But for more than thirty years she is best known as a stalwart defender of the […]
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WHAT DO YOU think it means? The New York Times reported yesterday that some psychologists were feeling panicky about physician James Heilman’s decision to upload the canonical Rorschach inkblots to Wikipedia along with their most-frequently […]
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WHEN I WATCH old monster movies, I think, What is it with these scientists? Whenever you have some Misshapen Fiend lurching all over the frame, muttering gibberish, trying to kill everything in its path and […]
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