Susan Hough, a seismologist at the United States Geological Survey (USGS), was scouring archives for information about a 7.3-magnitude earthquake that struck Charleston, South Carolina, in 1886. Her search brought her to a bookstore where she encountered Haunted Summerville, a collection of eerie tales from a small town just north of Charleston.“It was the sort of thing you stash in the back of your mind,” Hough says. At first, she didn’t give it much thought. But near Halloween, when the ...read more
When it comes to animals with incredible memories, fish typically don’t come to mind, in fact, it's quite the opposite. Even the poor goldfish has been accused of only having a 10-second memory, though science has proved that false. However, a new study published in Biology Letters found that not only do certain fish have a great memory, but they’re also able to tell people apart. Could Fish Recognize Humans?While doing research for a different study, divers in a research station in the Me ...read more
The weather inside our Solar System is tough to track. But even tougher to track is the weather outside our Solar System. Implementing all four of the telescope units of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), a team of researchers has observed the weather on WASP-121b, or Tylos, an exoplanet around 900 light-years away, identifying the layers of its atmosphere for the first time. Reporting their results in a study in Nature, the team identified three layers of churning ...read more
There’s a new king in town — if the town you’re talking about is the Egyptian jungle 30 million years ago.Paleontologists unearthed a nearly complete skull of an apex predator, which likely hunted early versions of primates, hippos, and elephants in what is now a desert. The skull included sharp teeth and signs of powerful jaw muscles. The scientists described it as having a hypercarniverous diet in recent study published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.The leopard-like animal sk ...read more
The demise of dinosaurs around 66 million years ago sent major ripples throughout ecosystems, and it may have even paved the way for fruit to evolve. New research has scoured through the evolutionary history of fruit and seeds to determine when and how they changed in size over time, confirming that dinosaur extinction led to the growth of large fruit that fueled our primate ancestors’ diets. A recent study published in the journal Palaeontology shows the ebbs and flows of seed size throughou ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine