Prehistoric peoples may have created the world’s oldest lunisolar calendar thousands of years ago to mark a calamitous comet strike, according to a new study. That conclusion is based on a new interpretation of carvings on stone pillars at the 12,000-year-old site of Göbekli Tepe in Türkiye.Martin Sweatman, a professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, analyzed a series of V-shaped symbols on a pillar at the site. Sweatman believes each of these shapes represents a single day, with ...read more
Hard times can sometimes bring people together. For rhesus macaques, a destructive hurricane made their group an altogether friendlier place and helped increase individual survival year over year.“It’s crazy — things have changed so much since the hurricane,” says Camille Testard, an ethologist at Harvard University. “The monkeys are less aggressive — they form these larger groups and interact with monkeys they’ve never interacted with.”Rhesus macaques are native to Asia. But pri ...read more
Summer 2024 was officially the Northern Hemisphere’s hottest on record. In the United States, fierce heat waves seemed to hit somewhere almost every day.Phoenix reached 100 degrees for more than 100 days straight. The 2024 Olympic Games started in the midst of a long-running heat wave in Europe that included the three hottest days on record globally, July 21-23. August was Earth’s hottest month in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 175-year record.Overall, the global ave ...read more
The seventh season of Julia Child’s “The French Chef,” the first of the television series to air in color, revealed how color can change the experience of food. While Child had charmed audiences in black and white, seeing “Bouillabaisse à la Marseillaise” in color helped elevate the experience from merely entertaining to mouthwatering.I am a psychologist who studies visual abilities. My work, through a serendipitous research journey into individual differences in food recognition, unc ...read more
The English word “puzzle” is unusual, according to Marcel Danesi, a professor of semiotics at the University of Toronto. Embracing everything from riddles and logical conundrums to mathematical problems and optical illusions, he notes that “it has no equivalent in any other language.”That might seem to make sense — this constellation of brainteasers doesn’t obviously share much in common. But at the most basic level, all puzzles (jigsaws, crosswords, or detective novels) have a quest ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine