Asteroids may have stopped pummeling Earth some 600 million years earlier than scientists thought, giving life that much more time to evolve. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The solar system once experienced a meteor shower of epic proportions: Asteroids whizzed around the inner planets, crashing down in a rain of fire that left their surfaces scarred for billions of years. Astronomers typically call this period the Late Heavy Bombardment.
But exactly when that fiery assault happened has been ...read more
A reconstruction of a Neanderthal man and child at Vienna's Natural History Museum. (Credit: Wolfgang Sauber/Wikimedia Commons
Being a lifelong surfer or diver sometimes comes with an odd side-effect: the growth of small, bony knobs in the ear canals, the result of chronic exposure to cold water and air.
They're often referred to as "surfer's ear" because the condition is common among those who ride the waves. But there might well be a more apt term for the condition, based on new finding ...read more
Graphite, an allotrope of carbon. (Credit: Miriam Doerr Martin Frommherz/Shutterstock)
Carbon is, all things considered, pretty great. Its position on the periodic table of elements — which symbolizes the amount of spare electrons it has, more or less — allows it to form an incredible variety of molecules. This includes allotropes, the different forms an element can take on its own based on its structure. Diamond, coal and graphene are all just varieties of carbon.
But that&rs ...read more
A fecal transplant capsule from OpenBiome. (Credit: Erik Jacobs)
Mark Smith dares you to come up with a fecal joke he hasn’t heard. It’s not your typical industry parlance, but when you’re in the business of transplanting the stuff, it helps to have a sense of humor about it. “I think we’ve gone through just about every poop pun under the sun,” says Smith, who makes a living reallocating the contents of people’s bowels.
He’s the co-founder a ...read more
Much of our genome has no apparent purpose. Is it so-called "junk DNA" or do we simply not understand it? (Credit: ktsdesign/Shutterstock)
Would
you purchase a book with over 98 percent of the text written in gibberish?
Biology has no business in the book industry, yet it still writes a pretty
fascinating guidebook: DNA. Our genetic manual holds the instructions for the proteins
that make up and power our bodies. But less than 2 percent of our DNA actually
codes for them.
The
rest — ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine