The annual dog costume contest was beginning at my block party. I popped out of my house without my hearing aids and cheered on the winners, a husky dressed as a bumble bee and a labradoodle in a wizard’s robe. Afterward, I chatted with a few friends until one admitted she could barely hear me. I live in a quiet world, and without my hearing aids in, I tend to be even more soft-spoken. It was a good reminder that I needed to wear my hearing aids.I’m not the only one who needs a reminder ...read more
It didn’t take long for Edward Chang to see the implications of what he was doing. The neuroscientist and brain surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, was studying the brain activity behind speech, that precise and delicate neural choreography by which lips, jaw, tongue, and larynx produce meaningful sounds. By implanting an array of electrodes between the outer and inner membranes of the brain, directly over the area of the brain that controls speech, he and his team were abl ...read more
A massive meat-eating bird sat high atop the food chain about 12 million years ago. Researchers analyzed a bone of the creature found in northern South America nearly 20 years ago and determined that it was likely a “terror bird” related to Phorusrhacids, according to a report in Palaeontology. Terror birds were carnivorous, living off small to mid-sized mammals. Earlier examples of Phorusrhacid fossils grew up to 9 feet tall. But this one was likely 5 percent to 20 percent larger, based on ...read more
Long before humans figured out how to harness solar power, photosynthesizers beat us to it. Our first attempt came less than 3,000 years ago, when the ancient Greeks built magnifying glasses to concentrate light for starting fires. By then, other lifeforms had already been converting those same rays into chemical energy for upwards of 3.5 billion years. There is truly nothing new under the sun.This process, called photosynthesis, is fundamental to almost all life on Earth. Primary producers (pla ...read more
Nobody has seen the original list of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The Greek historian Herodotus and later Callimachus are purported to have created this list more than two millennia ago, but their original writings on this topic haven’t survived — we only know they included sites like the Colossus of Rhodes and the Lighthouse of Alexandria based on the writings of others later on.The only surviving wonder of these original seven that still stands is the Great Pyramid of Giza — t ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine