Stone came first. Then there was bronze. Then there was iron. Since the 1800s, scholars have split early human history into three separate “ages,” according to the main materials that hominins turned into tools and weapons. But what about wood? Was there ever such an age as the “Wood Age?”The answer is far from simple. Though there is no set period in human history that archaeologists have specifically identified as the “Wood Age,” scholars stress the sustained importance of the mate ...read more

Our understanding of cats, their behavior, and their ways of communication is still in its infancy. While cat domestication has been around for over 10,000 years, dating all the way back to Ancient Egypt, there is still a lot we don’t know about our feline friends. And the pets seem, at first sight, to have only one facial expression: aloof.But research is slowly catching up. A recent study carried out by researchers at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has found that when interacti ...read more

The animal kingdom is brutal. To survive, many animals have evolved with built-in weapons, including horns, quills, shells, claws, and tusks, to name a few. Members of the Cervidae family — including the white-tail deer, mule deer, elk, moose, and reindeer/caribou — have developed antlers to serve as a defense system. But they also have other purposes. Here, we answer all your antler questions. Read on to find out more.1. What Are Antlers?(Credit: Rick Fansler/Shutterstock) Antlers are bony ...read more

Many, but not all, laws of physics have been broken over the centuries. Some are actively being broken right now, which is a good thing, because that means there’s more to learn about the universe.What Are the Laws of Physics?First off, the word “law” when it comes to physics has a bit of a loose definition, even among physicists. Sometimes the term applies to properties of the natural world that we have consistently observed to be true for a very long time. Sometimes the word is attached ...read more

Almost four years to the day after an unexpected explosion at New Zealand's White Island killed 22 people, tragedy has struck another volcano that is frequented by climbers and tourists. Marapi (not to be confused with Merapi) in Indonesia experienced a small and unexpected explosion on Sunday. The aftermath of the blast appears to be at least 11 hikers dead and a dozen more missing. Sadly, we again have to discuss the dangers of tourism on a potentially active volcano.Much like Whakaari (White ...read more

We seem to have entered something of an alien renaissance. Public interest in extraterrestrial speculation soared this summer, as former intelligence officials testified to Congress that the U.S. government is in possession of materials from a spacecraft of “non-human origin.”For all its mystery and intrigue, though, this moment is only the latest surge in a century of extraterrestrial hype, and of claims to the existence of alien artifacts. So far none have held up to scrutiny, and it remai ...read more

The Science Near Me blog is a partnership between Discover magazine and ScienceNearMe.org.When Jake Baskin attends hands-on coding events in classrooms during Computer Science Week, he’s learned to expect a curious occurrence.“There's always at least one student who is really upset when the hour ends,” says Baskin, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association, an organization that supports computer science education across the country.Some of the kids his organization wo ...read more

We all want to forget about the grief and destruction caused by COVID-19. But, sadly, public health concerns such as major pandemics could be even more frequent in the future: A 2021 study analyzed data on previous disease outbreaks and found that the rate of novel pandemics breaking loose to infect humans is rising. What's more, the risk of outbreaks will increase three-fold over the coming decades. “One may erroneously presume that one can afford to wait another 100 years before experiencing ...read more

No matter how you feel about TikTok, you must admit it can get us thinking. #GirlMath (or #GirlMaths if you're Down Under or Across the Pond) went viral when it spoofed the ways women supposedly play mind games about spending. Why Did Girl Math Become a Trend? Girl Math is enough to make a feminist's blood curdle (to be clear, there's also Boy Math and even Corporate Math, although those memes don't focus so much on shopping). But Girl Math is also, well, funny. And it hit a nerve. The trend li ...read more

This story was originally published in our Jul/Aug 2023 issue as "Breaking the Interspecies Barrier." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.On a warm fall day in 2021, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) surgeon Jayme Locke peered into a sliced-open abdomen and braced for the task ahead of her: transplanting two pig kidneys into a brain-dead human recipient for the first time in history. Locke had done experimental surgeries before, even putting pig kidneys into babo ...read more