(Credit: dotshock/Shutterstock) Studies of human evolution typically look at spans of thousands of years — the length of time it often takes various mutations to take hold and become noticeable. Evolution is more dynamic than that though; it’s an ongoing process with subtle variations on traits emerging while others dip into the background. Measuring the kinds of changes that are going on right now would give us valuable insights about not only our past, but also into where we ...read more

By: Megan Ray Nichols It’s always fun to have a ladybug land on your arm while outside — but these days, it’s more and more likely that any ladybugs landing on you or the plants in your garden are not native to North America. Over the past three decades, several ladybug species native to North America have all but disappeared from the landscape. At the same time, other species, introduced from Europe and Asia, have proliferated.  What’s happening to our native ladybu ...read more

Ghostly Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon. NASA. A close look at the Apollo 11 EVA footage shows ghostly astronauts, which of course has launched speculation that the footage is faked. If NASA could get to the Moon, why couldn’t it capture good video?! The footage wasn’t faked. The poor quality and ghostly look is an artifact from the odd way NASA had to convert the lunar footage to a format that could be broadcast. To understand this, we have to unpack how exactly TVs work ...read more

11. In 1868, Charles Darwin was the first to document a collection of physical and behavioral traits seen in domestic animals, particularly mammals, but not their wild relatives. 12. It wasn’t until 2014, however, that researchers offered a single explanation for the phenomenon of floppy ears, smaller teeth, tameness and other “domestication syndrome” traits: a mild deficit in neural crest cells.13 In vertebrate embryos, neural crest cells (NCCs) form along the dorsal side, or ...read more

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It’s a no-brainer to harness renewable energy sources like solar and wind. But a recent study in PNAS suggested that wind (and other renewables) will fall short of slashing carbon emissions, because there just isn’t enough of it in the U.S. Based on data from a company owned by one of the study’s authors, this map’s white areas show where wind turbines would be most effective — but because wind isn’t available all the time, they’d only produce roughly 50 ...read more

The full text of this article is available to Discover Magazine subscribers only. Subscribe and get 10 issues packed with: The latest news, theories and developments in the world of science Compelling stories and breakthroughs in health, medicine and the mind Environmental issues and their relevance to daily life Cutting-edge technology and its impact on our future ...read more

Picture rows of translucent tanks in a dark room. Partially formed embryos float silently, bathed in amniotic fluid. That’s the science fiction portrayal of an artificial womb, where machines gestate our babies, stirring unsettling undertones of inhumanity. It’s birth without pregnancy. As The Matrix’s Neo might say: Whoa. While that’s still the stuff of fantasy, there have been serious attempts to create artificial wombs dating back to the 1960s. Most fell far short of t ...read more

The full text of this article is available to Discover Magazine subscribers only. Subscribe and get 10 issues packed with: The latest news, theories and developments in the world of science Compelling stories and breakthroughs in health, medicine and the mind Environmental issues and their relevance to daily life Cutting-edge technology and its impact on our future ...read more