Category Archives: Science

Chris Jordan: The Midway Atoll

This is not an assemblage, it is an albatross that died after eating debris its parents mistook for food. The phenomenon is common in the garbage-choked Midway Atoll where thousands of such corpses appear yearly. The photographer, Chris Jordan, captured these transfixing images just as he found them. See more on the [...]

A Still More Glorious Dawn…

Third Man Records is a Nashville-based label set up by The White Stripes’ Jack White. Their expressed mission includes the promotion of vinyl records, alongside novel digital formats. In a kind of weird meshing of ideas, they will release a 7” single of the song “A Glorious Dawn“ by John Boswell, which was a bit [...]

Snow Monkeys Washing Potatoes

I came across this wonderful clip from BBC’s Life on Earth from 1979, featuring a young David Attenborough, while searching for samples of Edward Williams music for the program, which has recently been released for the first time by Trunk Records.

Seahorses

A fascinating article on the sex lives of seahorses in The Guardian today.  Above is Jean Painlevé’s brilliant The Seahorse (1934).  In this version Painlevé’s enthusiastic scientific-poetic narration is replaced with a soundtrack by Current 93.  I prefer the original but still worth watching.

Great robot: DASH

Thank you Filip Tyden.

Sci-Emo – “We float like a mote of dust in the morning sky”

Carl Sagan was an astronomer who hosted several successful popular science shows in the 1970s and 80s. He was deeply involved in bringing different aspects of science to public attention and also made some groundbreaking contributions to the research into extraterrestrial life. He believed that the existence of other technological civilizations was highly probable, but [...]

LIFE’s 30 Dumb Inventions

Because who wouldn’t want a pair of artificial Japanese breasts with a built-in heartbeat? Or for that matter, a precarious outdoor cage in which to dangle your infant several stories over the street. LIFE magazine has cataloged its picks for most absurd inventions of all time, most of which are rather amusing. A few of [...]