Ethiopia's Bale Mountains. (Credit: Michele Alfieri/Shutterstock)
High-altitude environments are not exactly welcoming places to call home. It’s hard to breathe, there’s little shelter and being that much closer to the sun means more exposure to UV radiation. The inhospitable conditions are why high mountains and plateaus were some of the last places on Earth humans occupied.
Now researchers find prehistoric humans lived in a high-altitude rocky outcrop in Ethiopia’ ...read more
Hopefully that bag isn't made out of organic cotton. (Credit: Vasiliy Ptitsyn/Shutterstock)
We all care about the environment at least a tiny bit. Some
of us more than others. But there are things a few of us do with the best
intentions that, it turns out, fall somewhere between not helpful and
completely counterproductive. Here are some of the worst offenders and how to
avoid them.
Recycling something “just in case”
Yeah, sadly, “aspirational
recycling” is not h ...read more
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Imagine trying to bend an inflated bicycle tire tube in half. It's a bit difficult, though not impossible. When you let go, the pressure inside snaps the tube back to its normal shape, as if spring-loaded.
What you're doing when you bend the tube is essentially storing energy inside it, to be released all at once when you let go. The trick isn't very useful when it comes to bike tires, of course, but scientists have found that a species of midge has a unique way to put this tech ...read more
(Credit: Quality Stock Arts/Shutterstock)
If you’re a doomsday prepper or were alive during the Cold War you may already be aware – and fearful – of an imminent electromagnetic pulse (EMP) event. It’s a disaster scenario that’s captured the imaginations of filmmakers and video game creators, as well as legitimate organizations, like the United States government.
EMPs are brief but powerful jolts of high-frequency electromagnetic waves that can fry electronics ...read more
Galaxies with central black holes can take various forms depending on the angle at which astronomers see them. (Credit: NASA)
Every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. And some of those black holes are actively ejecting huge amounts of high-energy light out into the cosmos.
Astronomers divide some of these active galaxies, which otherwise look like normal spirals, into two types, so-called Seyfert 1 and Seyfert 2 galaxies. Seyfert 1 galaxies have distinctive light ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine