Difficult Children Are Only Slightly More Likely To Have Insecure Attachments With Parents

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Children with difficult temperaments, including personality tendencies such as irritability and having a hard time being comforted, are only slightly more likely than other children to have insecure attachment relationships with one or both of their parents, according to our research. This finding refutes the long-standing notion held by many psychologists that early attachment behaviors are mainly determined by a child’s temperament.An attachment relationship reflects the child’s expectatio ...read more

Is Ball Lightning Real? The Science Behind Nature’s Strangest Light Show

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Ball lightning has fascinated and puzzled people for centuries. This rare and mysterious phenomenon, often described as a glowing sphere of light that appears during thunderstorms, has been the subject of countless anecdotes, scientific investigations, and debates. But is ball lightning even real? And if so, what causes it? Here, we’ll briefly dive into the basics of ball lightning, exploring what it reportedly looks like, how rare it is, what might cause it, and whether it poses any danger.Wh ...read more

Will Phones Let You Smell What’s On The Other End Of The Call One Day?

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Imagine this: You pick up your phone for a video call with a friend. Not only can you see their face and hear their voice, but you can also smell the cookies they just baked. It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, but could it actually happen?I’m a computer scientist who studies how machines sense the world.What Phones Do NowWhen you listen to music or talk to someone on your phone, you can hear the sound through the built-in speakers. These speakers convert digital signals i ...read more

South African Rock Art Appears to Draw Upon Extinct Creatures

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Artists take inspiration from many sources. For the San people of South Africa, the spark that inspired some of their rock paintings may have come from fossils of creatures that went extinct more than 200 million years ago. A study in PLOS ONE says that not only did the San draw on bones of dicynodonts — large animals with downward-turning tusks that roamed the Earth before dinosaurs — but that they beat Western paleontologists to the punch. The “winged serpent” panel depicts a creature ...read more

The Earth Might Have Been a Ringed Planet Long Ago

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Everyone who has ever seen Saturn through a telescope is astonished to see the system of rings that surround it. Those rings are rock and ice that span thousands of kilometers around the planet. They are the hallmark of Saturn, but ring systems exist around Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune as well, albeit in less dramatic forms.Yet, you shouldn't need to be a giant planet to have a ring. As long as debris accumulates in the gravitational well of a planet, the rotation will cause it to form a ring a d ...read more

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