It took almost 75 years for researchers to record the first footage of the remains of the Titanic, buried over 2 miles beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. It then took them nearly 40 years more to release the footage in its fuller form. This week, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) released 80 minutes of untrimmed footage from its first filmed voyage to the sunken ship. Captured only months after a team from the WHOI found the wreck in 1985, the footage features several shots ...read more

Unless you’re a fan of comic-book series (and Netflix film) The Old Guard, you may never have heard of the Scythians before now, but chances are you’ve seen some aspect of their influence, down through the long years of human history. They are believed to originate from ancient Iran around 900 B.C., spreading from Central Asia into what is now Ukraine and parts of Russia. They were a formidable force in this part of the world for nearly a thousand years. Although archaeologists and anthropol ...read more

In the medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, surgical resident Izzy agrees to donate bone marrow. In a scene that likely made donation professionals cringe, Izzy grimaced on the operating table as the physician inserted a needle into her hip and aggressively rotated it. In real life, doctors have designed bone marrow donations to be as painless as possible. Most donors give stem cells that are harvested from the bloodstream before the blood is returned to the body. And those who give directly fr ...read more

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Robert Wadlow of Alton, Illinois, is the tallest man who has ever lived. He was 8 foot 11 inches and weighed in at 439 lbs. But he had a sad life, plagued with injury due to his towering height and the weight that put pressure on his joints and feet. What Happened to Robert Wadlow? Wadlow died in 1940 at just 22 years old due to a blister on his ankle that became infected and triggered septic shock in his body. "He is a pre-acromegalic giant of ...read more

Back in the late 1970s, the American psychologists Guy Woodruff and David Premack devised a series of experiments to explore the cognitive capacity of chimpanzees. Their work focused on the theory of mind, the seemingly innate ability of humans to infer the thoughts of other humans. The question that Woodruff and Premack asked was whether a chimpanzee could do the same. This influential paper triggered an explosion of interest in the “theory of mind”, at what age it develops in humans and w ...read more

In 1929, Edwin Hubble calculated the velocity of distant galaxies barely visible through the telescopes at the Mount Wilson Observatory. His observations were the first evidence of a theory that has become a foundation of modern cosmology — the universe is continuously expanding. If you trace that expansion far enough back in time, you reach a distant point in the past. At this point, the entire universe was squeezed into an unfathomably dense spec filled with molten subatomic particles. This ...read more

The great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) may seem like the fiercest predator in the ocean, but a recent study indicates they flee when orcas (Orcinus orca) enter their territory. Along the coast of Gansbaai — off the western cape of South Africa, a group of at least two orcas has been harassing and attacking great white sharks. So much so there have been notable ecosystem shifts. Enemies are common in the animal kingdom. Other antagonistic animal relationships stem from one species tr ...read more

This article contains affiliate links to products. Discover may receive a commission for purchases made through these links. The CBD gummy market is exploding, and is expected to reach nearly $14 billion by 2028. Within the overall hemp category, gummy products have expanded by roughly 30 percent in less than seven years (with the CBD market as a whole growing by over 20 percent in that same time frame). In other words, the green boom is showing no signs of slowing down. In this race, two of th ...read more

Deep in the jungles of Ecuador lives a creature with pale, pink eyes, long, sticky webbed fingers, greenish-gray skin and a black and yellow speckled belly. At first glance, it seems like a creature one would find in a fantasy world. And that's precisely the reason researchers decided to name the newly-discovered stream frog after the Father of Modern Fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkien.  "In a stream in the forest, there lived a Hyloscirtus. Not a nasty, dirty stream, with spoor of contamination and a mu ...read more

In 1863, an obscure chemist named Angelo Mariani from Corsica arrived in Paris. Coming from a long line of doctors and chemists, Mariani set up shop in a modest Parisian quarter and began unlocking the secrets of Erythroxylum coca, the Andean coca leaf, then a legal drug. Three years later, at age 25, Mariani had mastered the art of extracting cocaine and blending it with wine. Delighted with the results of his experiments, he launched Vin Mariani two years later. The Start of Vin Mariani (Coc ...read more