Humans Can Regenerate Cartilage, Study Finds, Offering Hope for Arthritis Treatment

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

(Credit: Africa Studio/Shutterstock) If you get a cut, it'll heal. If you lose some skin to road rash, it'll grow back. But lose a limb, and it's gone for good. Unless you're a salamander, a zebrafish or an axolotl, of course — all of which can regrow missing limbs. Now, scientists find that some of the molecules crucial to that process are at work inside of us. Specific microRNA molecules are key to limb regeneration in salamanders. It turns out that similar molecules in our own bod ...read more

Siamraptor suwati: First Bitey Dino of Its Kind in Southeast Asia

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

A reconstruction of the predatory dinosaur's skull based on partial fossils of Siamraptor suwati. (Credit: Chokchaloemwong et al., 2019) Siamraptor suwati joins the ranks of predatory dinosaurs known to science — and it's the first of its lineage from Southeast Asia, giving its discovery greater significance. When it comes to bitey dinos, most people think of T. rex and velociraptors (thanks, Jurassic Park...). But if toothy terrors are your thing, you should really get to know t ...read more

Chemistry Nobel Prize Honors Three Scientists Who Developed Lithium-Ion Batteries

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

(Credit: Abigail Malate, Staff Illustrator. Copyright American Institute of Physics) (Inside Science) -- The 2019 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to three scientists "for the development of lithium-ion batteries." The prize goes jointly to John B. Goodenough of the University of Texas at Austin, M. Stanley Whittingham of Binghamton University in New York, and Akira Yoshino, of Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan. At 97, Goodenough will be the oldest Nobel laureate ever awar ...read more

NASA’s ICON Satellite to Launch on Wednesday

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

The new orbiter will orbit in the ionosphere and study the interactions of Earth and space weather. (Credit: ASA Goddard's Conceptual Image Lab/B. Monroe) NASA will launch its Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) satellite on Wednesday, October 9, from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 9:30 p.m. EDT. The new satellite will orbit Earth, studying what happens when space weather and Earth weather interact in Earth’s ionosphere, the atmosphere level populated by ions a ...read more

How the First Exoplanets Were Discovered

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

The first exoplanets ever discovered were found orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12. It took years for astronomers to find exoplanets around sun-like stars. (Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech) In 1992, astronomers discovered the first exoplanet, or planet outside our solar system. But it didn’t come in any form they’d really anticipated. Neutron stars are the second densest type of object in the universe outside black holes. They form when a giant star dies and explodes outward as a result ...read more