Our relationship with yeast is like a college friendship that grew beyond keggers and into distinguished adulthood. We’ve partied with our eukaryotic wingmen dating back to at least 7000 B.C., using them in foods and head-spinning libations. In 1680, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, godfather of microscopy, gazed upon yeast for the first time; that’s when we started moving past the party years.
We still throw down with yeast, but we’ve grown up and have jobs now. These days, the fungus i ...read more
Atop Earth’s largest active volcano, an alarm bell has tolled unheeded for six decades. In 1958, Scripps Institution climatologist Charles Keeling began making precise measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at Mauna Loa Observatory. Back then, Earth’s atmosphere clocked roughly 310 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. It took just a year for Keeling to spot a now-familiar upward trend.
“You can think of it as taking planetary vital signs,” says Ra ...read more
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The full text of this article is available to Discover Magazine subscribers only.
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The latest news, theories and developments in the world of science
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Environmental issues and their relevance to daily life
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Our early solar system was a wild place. Dust grains grew into pebbles, and pebbles became world-building planetesimals. These rocks spun around and bumped into each other in a chaotic dance that left a trail of debris in its wake. The remnants of these festivities remain strewn about our cosmic backyard. Many rocky and metallic bodies now orbit in what’s called the Main Asteroid Belt, between Mars and Jupiter.
More than just leftovers, asteroids offer clues to the earliest days of our sol ...read more
The full text of this article is available to Discover Magazine subscribers only.
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The latest news, theories and developments in the world of science
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Strange Contagion: Inside the Surprising Science of Infectious Behaviors and Viral Emotions and What They Tell Us About OurselvesBy Lee Daniel Kravetz
After moving to Silicon Valley, science writer and new father Kravetz investigates a rash of suicides by teenagers in his community. He juxtaposes his personal journey into parenthood with the worries and rumors in the neighborhood about what led to the deaths. Using his background in psychology, Kravetz probes how humans’ inherent mimicry a ...read more
You're almost there.
Forget reality: In virtual reality, you can be whomever and wherever you want. VR makes the unreal real, using computer software and hardware that responds to our body’s movements to immerse us in a convincing alternate existence. There’s plenty of space to roam. VR places can be huge. In Second Life, an early pioneer of virtual worlds, you can attend university, own a blimp, have blue fur — whatever. It includes more than 600 square miles of otherworl ...read more
See the light on dark matter and dark energy.
Say the universe is a restaurant entrée. Astonishingly, everything that we can discern on the plate, so to speak — protons, paramecia, people, planets, pulsars, you name it — altogether adds up to a mere sprig of parsley. To a cosmic garnish such as ourselves, the vast majority of the universe is invisible, an empty plate dominated by “dark” matter and a “dark” energy. The effects of these phenomena are ...read more
Getting an edge with high tech and lowly microbes.
In 13th-century China, a field worker was killed with a sickle — and all villagers’ sickles were alike. So the investigator had every worker lay down his tool in a field, and observed that just one sickle attracted blowflies, which were known to seek out blood. Its owner, the culprit, immediately confessed. The Chinese sickle slaying is one of the first reported cases of forensic investigation. The role of science in evidence co ...read more
