Marking an engagement or the big wedding day itself with a ring is part and parcel of many cultures today. But you may be surprised to learn that wearing the ring on the fourth finger of the left hand is a tradition dating back at least a thousand years.It’s a practice that’s thought to stem from the belief that a vein ran from this finger all the way to the heart — the vena amoris. This idea is often attributed to the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, but the origins of the ring itse ...read more

Science is constantly improving and teaching us marvelous things about ourselves and the world around us. Our understanding of the sciences bends and molds with the times and is impacted by the humans who study it. And humans are, well, human — which means while we can make incredible discoveries, we're also prone to making mistakes. We carry with us biases that can lead to bad science. Here are five cases where scientists got it completely wrong.1.  Humoral Theory(Credit: Book illustration i ...read more

This story appeared in the September/October 2020 issue as part of Discover magazine’s 40th anniversary coverage. We hope you’ll subscribe to Discover and help support our next 40 years of delivering science that matters. The story was updated further in 2023. As dawn broke on April 15, 1912, the ‘Unsinkable Ship’ sank into the Atlantic. Only two days earlier, Titanic set out on its voyage carrying more than 2200 crew members and passengers. The world-class facilities aboard the vess ...read more

The heart is perhaps the body’s most resilient organ and, along with the brain, its most essential. The female heart, which weighs about eight ounces, beats 100,000 times a day (2.5 billion times in a lifetime), pumping blood with roughly the force needed to squeeze a tennis ball. That’s enough blood in an 80-year lifetime to fill 100 Olympic-sized swimming pools.To sustain this breakneck pace, the heart feeds greedily on its own blood supply, consuming about 5 percent of the body’s oxygen ...read more

Typical spacecrafts orbiting the Earth aren’t extremely far away. They’re only a few hundred miles above our heads. So, when it’s time to return to solid ground, it’s a relatively short trip.However, spacecrafts and similar objects in orbit are also moving at exceptionally high speeds. We’re talking 17,000 mph for a low-Earth orbit satellite or spacecraft, and even faster for higher orbits.Combined, these two factors create a dilemma — and a whole lot of heat — when bringing spacec ...read more

Drug overdose deaths have skyrocketed in the U.S. in recent years. In 2021, 106,699 people died of overdoses. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that number was up 14 percent from the year before. Experts contend that it’s not that more people are using drugs; it’s that the drug supply has been contaminated with highly potent fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is 50 times stronger than heroin. Overdose deaths that included fentanyl increased by 22 percent last year ...read more

[embedded content]Debate continues as to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, propelled in part by U.S. Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which conducted their own investigations. Both issued tentative conclusions that the disease originated in a scientific facility, fueling the lab leak theory. But scientists point to a likely animal source, ranging from horseshoe bats to raccoon dogs to even outer space.We’ve been here before with new diseases, according to epide ...read more

In 1895, seven men from the Norwegian whaling ship Antarctic made the first substantiated landing on the Antarctic continent. But four long decades passed before a woman could claim the same.Antarctica, with its extreme temperatures and barren wastelands, was viewed for many years as the perfect battleground for men seeking to prove their mettle. Having a woman there, according to popular belief, would merely invite distraction and “sexual problems.”And yet, in the decades since a woman did ...read more

This article contains affiliate links to products. Discover may receive a commission for purchases made through these links.You may be unconscious while you’re sleeping but your body is anything but idle. Depending on which stage of sleep you’re in, your brain and body could be very active. Your body goes through changes in respiration, brain activity, hormone production, and cardiac activity during sleep but one of the first changes to occur is a drop in body temperature. Body temperature ...read more

This article was originally published on Nov. 2, 2020.There are a number of religious objects that claim to be authentic pieces of history. Take the pieces of wood from Jesus’ cross, fragments of Muhammad’s beard or the Buddha’s tooth, for example. Because it’s difficult to verify the authenticity of these objects, they’ve remained largely outside the purview of science. The one notable exception, however, is a sheet of cloth in Italy, known as the Shroud of Turin.The Shroud of TurinPe ...read more