Have you ever played hide-and-seek in a new place? It’s much harder than playing at home. You only know the obvious hiding spots: under the bed, in the closet, behind the couch. The trick is trying to think of hiding spots you can’t even imagine. How do you search in places you never thought could be hiding spots?That is kind of what scientists like me do when we look for alien life; we’re trying to think of new ways to look for life. In the meantime, we’re looking for life by looking fo ...read more
Saying “hi” can be complicated. That greeting’s meaning can be altered by the tone of your voice, the tilt of your head, your eye contact, and whether and how you raise and wave your hand. And the nature of a hand wave could differ if it’s directed toward one person, a group, someone new, or someone familiar.It turns out that greetings — and communication in general — by elephants is equally nuanced. Over the past few decades, researchers have explored three “C’s” of elephant c ...read more
Normandy’s beaches bear more than memories of D-Day, the 1944 landing of some 130,000 Allied troops in Nazi-occupied France during World War II. Another human species once stalked those grounds.About 80,000 years before WWII, when the shore lay several miles farther out, Neanderthals camped on the dunes of what is now Normandy. Butchering prey, fashioning stone tools, building fires — as the group busied themselves with daily chores, they left hundreds of footprints in the mud.Sands swept ov ...read more
It’s the season for emergences, whether you’re a dragonfly, firefly, periodical cicada or fly fishing enthusiast! The warm weather brings a variety of citizen science opportunities, some of them fleeting, so we hope you can get outdoors and experience the wonders of nature with your friends and family, and help document them for the many researchers trying to understand and preserve them.Dragonfly SwarmA female blue dasher dragonfly (Pachydiplax longipennis) gazes out at her blog-reading aud ...read more
The world is rich with sound — birdsong, rainfall, children playing in a park, traffic on a busy street, a crowd cheering at a sporting event. But for some people, rather than enriching life, sound can make life nigh unbearable.A condition called hyperacusis, sometimes called sound sensitivity, is a rare hearing disorder in which sounds that typically don’t bother most people seem particularly loud and uncomfortable. Some common sounds that are unbearable to people with hyperacusis are water ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine