When Sydney hosted the 2000 Summer Olympics, an unlikely hero emerged: an unofficial mascot known as Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat. Introduced by comedians, it helped to kick off a wave of love for a critter not always adored by human Australians. Over the centuries, the native marsupial has been eaten in stew and maligned as a pest. Now, it’s a focus of conservation and animal welfare efforts.Wombats are closely related to koalas and nurture their young in pouches like other marsupials. Of the t ...read more
Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers produces a report card for the nation’s infrastructure that assigns grades based on the condition of structures like roads, bridges, and dams, and the investments that they need. Heavy rainfall generated widespread flooding. in the Upper Midwest in late June 2024, putting at least one aging dam at risk. In southern Minnesota, the Blue Earth River cut a path around the Rapidan Damin Rapidan Township, about 15 miles south of Mankato, on J ...read more
When most folks imagine the asteroids, they likely picture chunk of rocky rubble, maybe mixed in with some metals based on distant observations and flybys. They shouldn't be very complicated because they're just leftovers from the formation of the solar system. Most of the meteorites that have been sampled on Earth have a lot of the same basic minerals and elements as well.As it turns out, going out to the asteroid belt and directly sampling one of these primordial objects has turned that notion ...read more
Dating can be tricky. If your timing is off, it can result in misunderstandings. This is especially true in fields like archeology and paleontology. If an item is identified as hailing from an incorrect year, entire lines of research can be put into question. So when Sturt Manning, an archeologist from Cornell University, and colleagues received a radiocarbon date that didn’t appear to line up with the archeological evidence, they tweaked the dating technique and came up with a more definitive ...read more
For decades, the University of Michigan Library held an esteemed article. The precious paper was a letter penned by Italian scientist Galileo Galilei, which included sketches of Jupiter’s moons.The library acquired the letter in 1938 and considered it a prized possession because it was evidence of Galileo’s thought process as he worked toward his understanding that the planets revolved around the sun.But a historical detective sensed it was a fake and one of many manuscripts or documents tha ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine