Tennis players' grunts predict whether they will win or lose.
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Category: Discover Magazine
Jupiter's Great Red Spot Imaged Like Never Before
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New, Noninvasive Imaging Technique Finds Heart Disease Before It Hurts
Mapping fat accumulation around arteries in the heart. (Credit: A.S. Antonopoulos et al., Science Translational Medicine (2017)) A new, noninvasive imaging method lets researchers pick up on the warning signs of heart disease long before a heart attack or stroke can take place. The noninvasive technique uses current computed tomography (CT) scanning technology to analyze images of fatty deposits lining blood vessels in order to flag potentially dangerous inflammation. Using the data from heart ...read more
Satellite images reveal an iceberg with twice the volume of Lake Erie breaking off the Antarctic Peninsula
An image acquired by the Suomi-NPP satellite on July 12, 2017 reveals a gargantuan iceberg calving from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica. (Image source: NASA Worldview) It has been predicted for a long time, and now it has finally happened: One of the largest icebergs ever recorded has broken free of the Larsen C Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula. Scientists monitoring a growing rift in the ice shelf confirmed today in a blog post that the trillion-ton iceberg had calved. ...read more
Shape-shifters Once Ruled the Planet
An artist’s impression of rangeomorphs. (Credit: Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill) Before sharks and whales ruled the seas as the biggest bad boys (and girls) of the sea, there were rangeomorphs, a bizarre plant-looking-animal-type … thing. They roamed the seas of Earth around 540 million years ago, absorbing nutrients drifting in the water. Rangeomorphs were the biggest thing in the game — and had the shape-eshifting skills to make themselves as big or as small as they needed. That c ...read more
A Delaware-sized Antarctic Iceberg Has Broken Into the Ocean
A 70-mile-long crack runs across the Larsen C Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula, months before it calved into the ocean. (Credit: Jeremy Harbeck) After months of dangling on by a miles-thin thread of ice, an iceberg roughly the size of Delaware just calved off Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf and began drifting out into the ocean. Scientists say the complete breakthrough happened sometime between July 10 and today, July 12. It was spotted by NASA’s Aqua MODIS satellite instrument ...read more
Chronotypes: Evolution Explains Night Owls and Early Birds
Two Hadza hunters returning from a hunt. A new study of chronotypes, or sleep and activity patterns, among the Tanzanian hunter-gatherers sheds light on the evolutionary advantages of staggered snoozing. (Credit Wikimedia Commons/Andreas Lederer) In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight… catchy song, even if it misrepresents Panthera leo. Lions, like many other predators, are opportunistic about when they hunt, and that includes plenty of nocturnal prowling. New research ...read more
Remember the North Pole winter thaw? A new study finds a rising trend in Arctic warming spikes in winter
During the N-ICE2015 expedition, scientists froze their boat, the Lance, into the Arctic sea ice to gather data from January to June of 2015. (Source: Norwegian Polar Institute) During each of the past three years, something quite bizarre has happened in the central Arctic. No, global warming did not cause some Thing to rise up out of the ice and go on a rampage. It was temperatures that rose up. And not just by a little. This occurred during extreme warming events near the Nort ...read more
In a First, Photons are 'Teleported' from Earth to Space
A station used for receiving information from the satellite. (Credit: Xinhua/Jin Liwang) Chinese researchers have successfully transmitted quantum entangled particles from a station on earth to a satellite orbiting far overhead. The experiment is part of an ongoing effort by researchers using the Micius satellite to achieve long-distance quantum communication, a feat that would yield hacker-proof information networks. In this most recent work, researchers from the University of Science an ...read more
How Ancient Peruvians Partied on Eclipse Day
A total solar eclipse over Australia in 2012. (Credit: NASA) Solar-eclipse fever is about to heat up as millions of Americans celebrate the astronomical spectacle happening Aug. 21. Businesses and universities along its shadowy bandwidth from Lincoln Beach, Ore., to Charleston, S.C., are organizing days-long events. There will be festivals with live music, art displays and camping. A special event in Illinois features a performance by hard-rock legend Ozzy Osborne. Many more are organizing ecl ...read more