Mosaics, art made from tiny, colored tiles, are alive and well at the Vatican. There, a 12-person studio dating back to the 1500s houses a catalog of 27,000 different varieties of tiles stored in a 9,000-drawer filing cabinet. www.reuters.com/lifestyle/in...

You know that screeching sound tape makes when you peel it away from glass? The source of the sound has baffled physicists—until now. Turns out it’s a sonic “whisper,” and it’s surprisingly technical.

In the days before accurate forecasting, the 1888 Great White Hurricane unexpectedly buried New York in 50 inches of snow. The storm led President Benjamin Harrison to create the Weather Bureau. www.usatoday.com/story/news/w...

It matters not at all whether we are holding our breath for a triumph or bracing for a tragedy. For as long as we are waiting, we are not living. www.themarginalian.org/2026/02/21/h...

Electric eels have long fascinated scientists. Now they’re the inspiration behind flexible batteries that could deliver bursts of power for next-generation soft robotics, implantable biomedical devices, and wearable electronics. connectsci.au/news/news-pa...

For the French and Italians, it’s arts, culture, and food. In Poland it’s heritage. For Australians it’s “mateship.” People of 25 nations of the world say what makes them most proud about their countries. www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/...

Population aging isn’t a forecast, it’s arithmetic. Yet assumptions about business performance haven’t kept pace. While processing speed declines after early adulthood, many capabilities that are key to complex work continue to improve well into midlife, peaking between ages 55 and 60.

The tiny “talking stamps” of Bhutan, issued in 1972, were actual 33⅓ RPM vinyl records with capsule histories of the country, its national anthem, and its history.

Concrete, essential to construction, is made with sand dug from riverbanks. Desert sand, though wildly abundant, is too fine for that. But mix it with wood powder, and a new material can emerge.

Is it ever ethical to lie? For many, it depends.

140+ years of climate anomalies in a remarkable visualization. It starts pretty chill and gets...well, you'll see.

Unsinkable? University researchers come up with a process to make ordinary metal tubes unsinkable. They stay afloat no matter how long they are forced into water or how heavily they are damaged. It could have huge nautical applications.

With Bridget Bardot’s death, Bob Dylan, Chubby Checker, and Bernie Goetz are all that remain of Billy Joel’s “Fire”.

@aeronautapp.com Just downloaded and installed 1.2. Getting “Session Expired” messages every hour or so. Heard you had some issues with this. How can I help you find the issue?

At age 20, Wilson Bentley first discovered under a microscope how each snowflake was a vanishing masterpiece. He didn’t realize then that it would become his life’s work. “I became possessed with a great desire to show people something of this wonderful loveliness.”

Students studying the arts, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences gain skills that machines will never master, such as critical thinking and collaboration. Judgment will likely never be AI’s strength.

After a tough day of decision-making, we say we’re ‘mentally drained’, as if we’ve used up some internal energy or worn out our willpower muscle. But what if that’s wrong? What if willpower doesn’t really deplete at all?

It’s hard to overstate the celebrity (and tragedy) of the Dionne Quints, five identical sisters born during the Great Depression—and then put on exhibit in an exploitative “baby zoo.” “Because of the accident of birth, we were not considered people.”

No one loves their mistakes on display, but these famous musicians left theirs in five timeless classics.

Science finds what riders already knew: Horses are not passive responders to human commands, but social partners who are surprisingly well-tuned to the emotional signals we give off.

Visualizing history linearly, on a timeline, is common today, but it wasn’t always that way. Cyclical and linear conceptions of time thrived side by side for centuries. But in the 19th century, four developments pushed us to change.

70% of French fry lovers spill ketchup when dipping on the go. 80% say they’ve considered skipping condiments altogether. Heinz won’t hear of it. They say they have the answer, coming soon to sports stadiums around the world.

Non-painters might be surprised by how long—and how passionately—the pros and cons of black pigment have been kicked around. Then, Leonardo da Vinci recommended adding black to create the light-dark effect we call chiaroscuro, and all hell broke loose.

The Universe’s normal matter consists of atoms. Every atom’s nucleus contains protons, whose number determines that element’s properties. Over 100 elements, sortable into a periodic table, are presently known. Only eight processes occur to create them all.

Time-saving, premade food is the fastest-growing category in the grocery business. To reduce waste, stores try to sell their oldest stock first, but paradoxically that’s actually counterproductive.

Despite vast differences in human and bee brains, both of us can do math. Might mathematics form the basis for a “universal language,” that one day could be used to help us communicate between the stars?

Coffeehouses aren’t new. They date back to the 16th-century and emerged in North America in Boston in 1676. Unlike taverns, coffeehouses were intellectual hubs and meeting places for dissenters and resistence.

For research or inspiration, hundreds of digitized cocktail books from around the world, some dating back to the 18th century. A free trove of drinking history.

@dharam.bsky.social Funnel Pro user here 👋 Can I use Funnel through the share sheet? I can’t seem to Figure out how to make that work. Appreciate your help.

We’ve all seen or even visited the destruction of the ancient city of Pompeii after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. But not everyone died, and the ones that escaped left with quite a story to tell.

@simonwillison.net Having discovered your blog only recently, I can’t tell you how happy I was to find your chronological “How I use LLMs and ChatGPT” playlist. Very thoughtful to structure it like that. The latest was a sip from the firehouse for me, but now I’m working through from the beginning.

100 years ago, deep thinkers imagined life in 2025. Some theories, like synchronized clocks, skyscrapers, and reading books on tablets, were on the money, but others not so much. And some ideas still seem light years away.

French relies heavily on accents, or more specifically, diacritical marks like the cedilla in “Français.” Ironically, though, it’s the influence of French, albeit an earlier version of the language, that explains why English doesn’t use accents. Fascinating.

Our glowing brains: Living tissues emit low-intensity light, or biophotons. The more energy a tissue burns, the more light it gives off—which means, of our body’s tissues, our brains may glow brightest of all. www.scientificamerican.com/article/your...

Lincoln once was asked, "If you called a dog's tail a leg, how many legs would he have?" "Four," he answered. "Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one."

Major categories of visible life on Earth had been settled for centuries. But in the 1980s scientists found “intraterrestrials,”microscopic organisms living deep inside Earth’s crust. These microbes proved that what we thought about the boundaries of life was wrong — and wildly so.

Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” Chicago’s debut “Chicago Transit Authority,” the original cast recording of “Hamilton,” Mary J. Blige’s “My Life,” and Microsoft’s reboot chime among 2025 entrants to the National Recording Registry.

A pacemaker so small, it can be injected into place. Impressive. It’s also: powered by our own body fluids, activated from outside the body by light signals, and dissolves away when it’s done working. Futuristic engineering from Northwestern University.

Prime numbers, those divisible by 1 and themselves, are easy to find at first. There’s 2, 3, 5, 7, 11. But things get harder as the numbers get bigger. For the first time in 6 years, there’s a new largest-ever prime, and it has over 40 million digits.

The Internet is a vast ocean of human knowledge, but it isn't infinite. And Al researchers have nearly sucked it dry. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Imagine a camera so small but so capable that it can capture full-color images comparable to a conventional camera that’s 500,000 times bigger. The device, the size of a grain of salt, is the work of researchers at Princeton University and the University of Washington. cacm.acm.org/news/a-camer...

Lobster, eels, clams, and mussels were among the dishes at the first Thanksgiving. Birds and deer, too, but alas, no potatoes. j.mp/2JjE96T #Thanksgiving

US President George Washington’s Thanksgiving Day Proclamation, October 3, 1789. j.mp/3lfRP0k #Thanksgiving #history

Massive buildings subtly affect how Earth spins and the length of our days. It all has to do with something called the “moment of inertia.” The more mass an object has (and the further away it is from the centre of rotation), the more it resists spinning. www.sciencefocus.com/news/human-s...

This seems as good a time as any to check out the batch cocktail calculator, designed for both pro bartenders and folks who make drinks at home, it takes your single-serving cocktail recipe and turns it into a batch of any size. www.batchcalc.com

The sun set at 1:27 PM Monday in Utqiagvik, Alaska, and won’t rise until January 22—for all of 48 minutes. Despite this, all locations on Earth see the same duration of sunlight every year. Utqiagvik gets about as many hours of sunlight as Miami; it all balances out. www.msn.com/en-us/weathe...

That walk outdoors, especially far from urban noise and pollution, always seems to lift our spirits. But might there be more to it than psychological well-being? Perhaps it’s also aero-nutrients, absorbed with every breath. www.sciencealert.com/your-body-ca...

@quarrygirlri.bsky.social Very glad to see you active here on Bluesky. This place is really blowing up! Hope all is well with you.

@smachlis.bsky.social So glad to see you here. The community is really growing and the interactions have been outstanding (I’ve long run a Red Sox account on Twitter and there’s no comparison with this place for engagement). Hope all is well on your latest journey!

What Leonardo da Vinci was doing at your age. edition.cnn.com/interactive/... #culture #arts #innovation