Roads are symbols of a functioning society. They make the transportation of people and goods possible and they date back to 4000 B.C. Sumerians built the first known stone-paved roads in Mesopotamia —modern-day Iraq. And since then roads have held societies together and made trade between other civilizations possible. Here are some of the oldest and most fascinating roads in history. The Silk Road(Credit: Dimitrios Karamitros/Shutterstock) The Silk Road wasn’t actually a road. Even the name ...read more
An unhealthy lifestyle is a common culprit for chronic diseases from heart disease to lung cancer, but Graves’ disease, on the other hand, is an autoimmune condition that evades such a straightforward explanation. When it comes to what causes Graves’ disease, the root of the autoimmune disorder, is widely unknown. Andrew Gianoukakis, professor of medicine at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine and chief of the division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism at Harbor-UCLA Medical ...read more
To understand more about Neanderthal small-game cooking techniques, a group of scientists went to the birds. They recreated how early humans butchered, prepared, and roasted pigeons, based on archeological evidence dating back 90,000 years from sites in Portugal. The chef-scientists reported their findings in in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.“Studying a variety of small prey can give us a better understanding of the diverse diet of Neanderthals and their adaptability to different envi ...read more
Most people know how to eat a fish taco. Not as many understand how an ancient aquatic organism shaped like a taco ate. Scientists revisited a fossil collection of the 500-million-year-old creature and determined that it used pincer-like mandibles to chew its food, according to a report in Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences.Revisiting an Ancient FossilAlthough the organism Odaraia had been discovered in the Burgess Shale over 100 years ago and described in the 1980s, several ...read more
In 2016, word came out about the discovery of a downright strange astrophysical object, somewhere in the constellation Cygnus. It wasn’t another Earth, but rather, a star.Citizen scientists had been combing through the data from four years of NASA’s Kepler mission when they encountered the star, officially named KIC 8462852. And it was an oddball. It randomly dimmed, like a flickering lightbulb, and could stay that way for several days. It fluctuated intensely and erratically, sometimes drop ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine