(Credit: David Mearns)
In 1503, a storm sank the Portuguese ship Esmeralda off the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, taking the lives of the crew. In 2014, divers and archaeologists returned to the wreck to retrieve what remained. That included this metal disk, thought to be an astrolabe — an instrument that mariners used to navigate by measuring the height of celestial bodies above the horizon.
Two features of the Portuguese flag — the coat of arms and an armillary ...read more
(Credit: DEREVYA/Shutterstock)
Plastics are everywhere, from our phones to our cars to our utensils. Now researchers find they're inside our bodies as well. Americans consume more than 70,000 microplastic particles every year, a new study says. That sounds like a lot, but that number is still likely an underestimate, the researchers say. The consequences to human health are largely unknown.
“The results of our study support the concept that we are living in a ‘plastic environme ...read more
Engineers hope the real InSight on Mars can use its robotic arm to help the mole start digging again, a test that has succeeded with replica instruments on Earth. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The digging instrument on NASA’s Mars InSight lander has been stuck since February 28, and engineers have been hard at work trying to get it moving again. The problem is with its Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package, or HP3, and specifically the part known as the mole, which auto-hammers its way ...read more
(Credit: Everett Collection/Copyright 20th Century Fox)
In the cutthroat Hollywood film industry, is it possible to know if an actor’s career is about to boom or bust? In many cases, yes.
Researchers from Queen Mary University in London created an algorithm that can predict with 85 percent accuracy whether a star’s golden years have passed or are still yet to come. In a study published June 4 in the open-access journal Nature Communications, scientists analyzed the profil ...read more
Successive waves of migration from Siberia created the Inuit populations in North America today. (Credit: Illustration by Kerttu Majander, Design by Michelle O'Reilly)
Who
were the First Americans? It's a question that for decades has divided researchers,
who have proposed competing theories as to how humans moved from Eurasia into
North America.
The
question is far from settled, though it is clear that by about 14,500 years ago
(and perhaps as far back as 30,000 years ago) humans had mov ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine