During their prime, the Vikings mastered the seas and went on to make wide-spanning voyages by boat. But how exactly did they know where they were going? A recent study, focused on a set of medieval stone disks found in Ukraine, supports the belief that Viking sailors used solar compasses to navigate and may have passed on this knowledge to other populations in Europe. The appraisal of the eight stone disks was featured in a December 2024 paper published in Sprawozdania Archeologiczne, a Polish ...read more
A new study published in Nature Medicine, suggests that the risk of developing dementia in the U.S. is more than double than described in previous studies, sitting at around 42 percent for adults above age 55.If accurate, that risk will result in a rise in annual cases, which will increase from a half million new cases in 2025 to a million new cases in 2060. According to the study authors, this anticipated increase in cases is a product of the age of the population in the U.S., where around 58 m ...read more
Researchers from the University of Glasgow unveiled a 3D printer that can create material in microgravity, which could improve space flight and may also help create better resources to use back on Earth. The patent for this new technology has been awarded to Gilles Bailet from the University of Glasgow’s James Watt School of Engineering. This printer could help improve communication transmissions back to Earth and eventually help create purer forms of essential pharmaceuticals. “We’ve te ...read more
The history of Earth’s climate is written within ice. Drilling vertically into ice and extracting a core is akin to measuring how old a tree is by counting a stump’s rings. But ice contains more information than just age. Scientists can deduce a particle time period's temperature. They can also measure trapped gases like CO2 and methane to see how they may have contributed to warming periods.Scientists have now retrieved the longest such documentation — an ice core nearly 2 miles long that ...read more
In recent years, the Great Lakes have been subject to some wild rumors, including the claim that a mysterious force, the supposed Great Lakes Triangle, was responsible for ships vanishing. Scientists countered that most shipwrecks actually occurred outside of the fictional triangle and were accounted for in a database.Such spooktacular stories may soon be put to rest. In 2019, the U.S. began a seafloor mapping initiative that included the Great Lakes. The project should be able to take note of s ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine