Skeleton Lake, formally known as Roopkund Lake, sits at more than 16,000 feet above sea levels in the Himalayas. (Credit: Atish Waghwase)
At the mysterious Skeleton Lake in northern India, the dead are talking,
revealing surprises through centuries-old DNA. And it's not what anyone
expected.
New research suggests the site is not the scene of a single natural disaster
that killed hundreds, as once thought. Skeleton Lake's emerging truth is far
more mysterious. The human bones littering its ...read more
A warm bath before bed can help you get to sleep, research shows. (Credit: MyImages - Micha/Shutterstock)
About 30 percent of Americans have trouble sleeping. Shahab Haghayegh, a University of Texas biomedical engineer, was one of them. Sleep eluded him. “I always had a hard time fall[ing] asleep,” he told Discover via email.
Over the counter medications like the hormone melatonin and Unisom, a sedating anti-histamine, can help people get to sleep. But the medicines aren& ...read more
This blog post is an edited excerpt from Human Impact, a new publication from Science Connected. Edited by Kate Stone and Shayna Keyles, Human Impact delivers 17 true tales of how humanity has changed the Earth, for better or for worse. This chapter appears in Human Impact as “Act Now: Engaging in Citizen Science,” and includes contributions from Caroline Nickerson, Kristin Butler, and Julia Travers.
Act Now: Engaging in Citizen Science
Ci ...read more
Spiraling cloud patterns called Von Kármán vortices, spotted at nighttime off the coast of Morocco on July 19, 2019 by the Suomi NPP satellite. (Source: NASA Earth Observatory)
Spiraling cloud formations are often visible in satellite images — but at night, as seen above?
Until recently, that has been rare, at best. But newer technology for sensing and processing light in the shortwave infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum has made it easier for satellites to s ...read more
The entrance to Denisova cave, where the ancient humans were first discovered. (Credit: Igor Boshin/Shutterstock)
Nestled in foothills of Russia’s Altai Mountains, Denisova Cave has been a research mecca since 2010, when fossil DNA from the site revealed a previously unknown human lineage, now called the Denisovans. Scientists have been working hard to reconstruct the cave’s history, through ongoing excavations as well as new analyses of materials recovered years ago.
First, wh ...read more
Astronomers using the Spitzer Space Telescope discovered that exoplanet LHS 3844b probably lacks any atmosphere at all. (Credit: ESO/NASA)
Rocky planets just a little larger than Earth are some of the best targets for finding life in our local cosmic neighborhood. They're abundant. But it’s not just the size that has to match Earth. Our planet wouldn’t be the life-sheltering place it is without its atmosphere, which keeps us warm enough not to freeze, but not so hot that we smothe ...read more
Left-handed people are under-represented as volunteers in human neuroimaging studies, according to a new paper from Lyam M. Bailey, Laura E. McMillan, and Aaron J. Newman of Dalhousie University.
Bailey et al. analyzed a sample of 1,031 papers published in 2017, finding that just 3.2% of participants were non-right-handed, even though this group makes up about 10-13% of the general population.
These findings are hardly unexpected. The exclusion of non-right-handed people from neur ...read more
Supernova 2016iet is an example of one of the most extreme types of stellar explosions, though it has some odd features. (Credit: Gemini Observatory/NSF/AURA/ illustration by Joy Pollard)
In November of 2016, the sharp-eyed Gaia spacecraft spied a supernova that exploded some billion light-years from Earth. Astronomers followed up with more telescopes, and quickly realized that this supernova – dubbed SN2016iet – was an odd one in many ways.
For one, the star that caused the s ...read more
