Nostalgia, mixed with a bit of curiosity, can lead to some important insights.When Richard Karban, an ecology researcher at the University of California, Davis, decided to return to the forest he surveyed in 1977 — this time accompanied by his daughter Claire, a graduate student in ecology at the University of Colorado, Boulder — he expected to see little change. After all, when he first visited Whiteoak Canyon in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, he’d seen much the same tree composit ...read more
In early 1991, several scientists went deep into the Siberian tundra on a covert mission. They worked for a secret laboratory funded by the Soviet government, and they needed a sample of variola major, the virus that causes smallpox.They headed to a cemetery from the 1800s reserved for smallpox victims and cut deep into the ice. They extracted several corpses still wrapped in caribou fur. The ice had preserved the bodies well, and the scientists took bone and tissue samples, hoping they still co ...read more
Most tropical lightning storms are akin to massive pots of boiling water — but emitting bursts of gamma radiation instead of steam, according to reports in Nature. Those bursts also occur more frequently and in more forms than previously thought.Scientists first detected high-energy gamma-ray bursts in Earth’s atmosphere in the 1990s. NASA launched satellites to see high-energy particles from objects in space, like supernovas. The satellites caught signs of the radioactive supercharged parti ...read more
Rabies is a deadly disease. Without vaccination, a rabies infection is nearly 100% fatal once someone develops symptoms. Texas has experienced two rabies epidemics in animals since 1988: one involving coyotes and dogs in south Texas and the other involving gray foxes in west-central Texas. Affecting 74 counties, these outbreaks led to thousands of people who could have been exposed, two human deaths, and countless animal lives lost.In 1994, Gov. Ann Richards declared rabies a state health emerge ...read more
When Walt Whitman wrote that he contains “multitudes,” he was probably referring to personal potential. But the 19th-century American poet may just as well have been referring to cells. Cells are both the smallest biological unit that can survive on their own, as well as the building blocks that construct all living organisms. They contain instructions that can produce over 200 different types — each with their own function. Those instructions contain rules about what kind of cells they ca ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine