On July 20, 1969, humanity achieved what was once thought impossible: landing on the Moon. The Apollo 11 mission, followed by five more successful Moon landings, marked a golden era of space exploration. However, after the last mission, Apollo 17 in 1972, humans haven’t set foot on the lunar surface again. It’s been more than 50 years, so why haven’t we returned to the Moon? The answer is complicated, involving politics, economics, and evolving priorities in space exploration.The End of th ...read more
Satellites have become a vital part of our daily lives, quietly orbiting Earth to enable technologies from weather forecasting to global communications. But while these modern marvels work tirelessly above us, they don’t last forever. Eventually, every satellite reaches the end of its life — and that often involves a fiery dive back through Earth’s atmosphere. But how often do satellites fall back to Earth, and what happens when they do?The Rise of the Satellite EraThe satellite era began ...read more
Sometimes, it’s a shark-eat-shark world. Documented cases of larger sharks dining on smaller ones are relatively rare. Scientists have now found the first evidence of a larger species consuming the porbeagle shark, according to a report in Frontiers in Marine Science.Porbeagles live in the Atlantic Ocean, the South Pacific Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. They grow to around 12 feet and weigh up to about 500 pounds. Scientists started tracking a group of porbeagles in 2020 — not to see if th ...read more
Nature is disordered, messy, chaotic. But upon closer look, you might start noticing patterns, sequences, and symmetry on all sorts of varying scales, from the grandest spiral galaxies to the tiniest snail shell. One popular pattern spotted in many places is the Fibonacci sequence. You’ve likely encountered it before, perhaps as a spiral graphic often superimposed over images of human ears, hurricanes, or nautilus shells. How many of them are actually examples of the Fibonacci sequence arising ...read more
If you’re feeling groggy during the day, and a cup or several cups of coffee just isn’t doing the trick, you might resign yourself to a cat nap. As the name suggests, those kinds of power naps are reminiscent of the ways our feline friends seem to laze and doze their entire days away. Sleeping may appear to be your cat’s favorite, or at least, most commonplace activity, and there’s good reason for it. Here's what to know about the ways cats sleep. Why Cats Sleep So Much(Credit: Svetlana ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine