The morning of January 12, 1888 was surprisingly warm in The Great Plains. The mercury rose above the freezing mark, melted ice dripped from roofs, and children left their heavy coats at home on their way to school. Across the region, people used the warm day to run errands or work outside.Thousands of people were caught unaware when a fierce blizzard suddenly transpired. Temperatures plummeted as low as negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and intense snow blinded those stranded outside. Hundreds of ...read more
For about 15 minutes on July 21, 1961, American astronaut Gus Grissom felt at the top of the world – and indeed he was.Grissom crewed the Liberty Bell 7 mission, a ballistic test flight that launched him through the atmosphere from a rocket. During the test, he sat inside a small capsule and reached a peak of over 100 miles up before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean.A Navy ship, the USS Randolph, watched the successful end of the mission from a safe distance. Everything had gone according ...read more
In the urgent quest for a more sustainable global food system, livestock are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, by converting fibrous plants that people can’t eat into protein-rich meat and milk, grazing animals like cows and sheep are an important source of human food. And for many of the world’s poorest, raising a cow or two — or a few sheep or goats — can be a key source of wealth.But those benefits come with an immense environmental cost. A study in 2013 showed that globally, livesto ...read more
The language of science continually changes. Throughout the last ten years, a wide range of words and phrases have emerged from obscurity into common usage in science. These include zika, Ebola, ChatGPT and so on, words that reflect the ebb and flow of scientific research and broader events and fashions within science and society. These changes show up in the papers, reviews and articles that scientists are constantly producing. Indeed, various researchers have attempted to map the evolution of ...read more
Pilot whales have always been joined at the hip. In fact, the tendency for a group of pilot whales to follow the direction of a group leader is exactly what earned them their name. Now, these nomadic oceanic dolphins are finding themselves navigating into shallow waters, leaving them stranded on various beaches in masses. A Sudden Increase in Pilot Whale StrandingAlthough stranding of pilot whales has been occurring for millions of years, there has been an alarming increase of global mass strand ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine