Today, insect eating is on the rise. Did our ancestors chow down on the critters, too? (Credit: CK Bangkok Photography/Shutterstock)
Anticipating food shortages in coming decades, some companies are touting insects as tomorrow’s protein source. Entrepreneurs are jumping on board and chips made of crickets are hitting grocery shelves. But scientists advise caution: They say more research is needed on the environmental impact of rearing insects at an industrial scale.
As sustainabilit ...read more
A very weak paper in PNAS has attracted some attention lately: An experimental test of the ovulatory homolog model of female orgasm
The paper aims to be a test of the hypothesis that the human female orgasm is a kind of evolutionary relic from an earlier stage in evolution.
In humans, ovulation happens on a monthly cycle and is not related to sexual activity. However, in some mammal species, such as rabbits, ovulation is triggered by sex (or copulation, as biologists say). In the new ...read more
NASA's InSight lander has its seismic instrument tucked under a shield to protect it from wind and extreme temperatures. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
NASA’s Mars InSight spacecraft landed on the Red Planet in November 2018. Scientists equipped the mission with a seismometer so they could learn how Mars releases seismic energy — that is, to get a feel for how the Red Planet rumbles. So far, InSight has recorded more than 100 seismic signals, and researchers are confident at leas ...read more
(Credit: MIT/Image courtesy of the researchers)
When even the most powerful telescopes can’t capture the views you want, it helps to have natural magnifying glasses to rely on. In a paper published Monday in Nature Astronomy, researchers describe how they zoomed in to capture a young, star-forming galaxy roughly nine billion light-years away in X-ray light.
To study such a distant galaxy, they used the fact that massive objects can warp space-time around them and magnify light ...read more
These snapshots of two merging stars in action show the overall strength of the magnetic field in color (yellow is more magnetic), as well as the magnetic field lines (hatching). The stars on the left, which don't have very strong magnetic fields, are just about to merge into a more massive and magnetic star (right). According to new research, such mergers can dramatically bolster the strength of the final star's magnetic field. (Credit: F. Schneider et al./Nature volume 574, pages 211–214 ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine