It’s the season for emergences, whether you’re a dragonfly, firefly, periodical cicada or fly fishing enthusiast! The warm weather brings a variety of citizen science opportunities, some of them fleeting, so we hope you can get outdoors and experience the wonders of nature with your friends and family, and help document them for the many researchers trying to understand and preserve them.Dragonfly SwarmA female blue dasher dragonfly (Pachydiplax longipennis) gazes out at her blog-reading aud ...read more
The world is rich with sound — birdsong, rainfall, children playing in a park, traffic on a busy street, a crowd cheering at a sporting event. But for some people, rather than enriching life, sound can make life nigh unbearable.A condition called hyperacusis, sometimes called sound sensitivity, is a rare hearing disorder in which sounds that typically don’t bother most people seem particularly loud and uncomfortable. Some common sounds that are unbearable to people with hyperacusis are water ...read more
Have you ever walked into a room and then wondered why you went there?If you’ve experienced this phenomenon, you’ve had a prospective memory lapse.Memory usually means remembering things that have already happened. But prospective memory is the ability to remember to do something in the future – such as stopping to get milk on the way home from work, calling your mom on her birthday or remembering to take your casserole out of the oven. Sometimes, errors lead to heartbreaking results – s ...read more
Everything in biology ultimately boils down to food and sex. To survive as an individual you need food. To survive as a species you need sex.Not surprisingly then, the age-old question of why giraffes have long necks has centered around food and sex. After debating this question for the past 150 years, biologists still cannot agree on which of these two factors was the most important in the evolution of the giraffe’s neck. In the past three years, my colleagues and I have been trying to get to ...read more
Neanderthals stopped roaming Earth around 40,000 years ago. Yet as time passes, new technologies are helping scientists learn more about Homo neanderthalensis, how they might have lived, and what similarities they may have shared with Homo sapiens. There’s even a debate about what Neanderthals sounded like. Scientists have long debated whether Neanderthals were capable of speech. Some argue that Neanderthals lacked the anatomical ability to even produce sounds.In the 1980s, scientists disco ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine