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
When we’re presented with a choice, we carefully weigh the alternatives and choose the option that makes the most sense — or do we? Only recently has science begun to unravel how we really make decisions. In the face of stress or time pressure, or even seemingly unrelated cues, our assessment of situations and the choices we ultimately make can be colored by innate biases, flawed assumptions and prejudices born of personal experience. And we’re clueless about how they influence ...read more
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
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
More than 350 million years ago, our distant fishy ancestors traded in the life aquatic for land. Once ashore, these four-limbed vertebrates, called tetrapods, branched into an impressive range of animals: amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, birds and mammals. The fossil record shows that as species evolved to fill particular ecological niches, a few of the tetrapod clan lost limbs (snakes), turned arms into wings (bats, birds and pterosaurs) or decided the heck with dry land and headed back to sea ...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
Can we improve medical devices by designing them to translate the language of the body? Materials scientist Canan Dagdeviren, who just launched a new research group at MIT, thinks so. Ever since she was a child growing up in Turkey, she’s turned tragedy and loss into research that speaks to hope. Her inventions suggest that scientists can harvest electricity from the movements of our organs, pick up the first hints of disease from subtle changes in physiological patterns, or track changes ...read more
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
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
Even before we’re born, human beings are sensitive to face-like shapes, according to a paper just published in Current Biology. British researchers Vincent M. Reid and colleagues of the University of Lancaster used lasers to project a pattern of three red dots onto the abdomen of pregnant women. The lasers were bright enough to be visible from inside the womb. The dots were arranged to be either “face-like”, i.e. with two “eyes” above one “mouth”, or in ...read more
