In the science fiction film The Fly, a scientist accidentally transforms into a winged insect that ultimately destroys him. In a collection of science articles about the fly, a team of scientists this week unpacked the details of how the Drosophila melanogaster brain operates — paving the way for a better understanding of how the human mind turns senses into actions, processes thoughts, and, perhaps most mysterious of all, stores experiences as memories.The foundation of the publications in Na ...read more
Most CubeSats weigh less than a bowling ball, and some are small enough to hold in your hand. But the impact these instruments are having on space exploration is gigantic. CubeSats – miniature, agile, and cheap satellites – are revolutionizing how scientists study the cosmos.A standard-size CubeSat is tiny, about 4 pounds (roughly 2 kilograms). Some are larger, maybe four times the standard size, but others weigh no more than a pound.As a professor of electrical and computer engineering who ...read more
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
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine