Penguins love company — some colonies of the flightless bird boast numbers over 1 million. And with squads that can run that deep, you can be sure they make a mess of things, if you know what I mean. (Hint: I’m talking about poop.) But penguin waste isn’t just messy, it can be useful, too. Researchers have used it to help spot colonies in the past. Now, it seems that poop might be good for something else as well.
In a study out in Current Biology, researchers from Vrije Univer ...read more
On Thursday, Blue Origin founder and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos unveiled the Blue Moon lander, a spacecraft that can deliver up to 6.5 tons of cargo – and possibly crew – to the lunar surface. The announcement was made at a news conference in Washington, D.C. Along with Blue Moon, he revealed his new BE-7 rocket for the lander, which he says has been in development for three years. If all goes according to plan, the company will test fire the rocket for the first time this summer. Toget ...read more
The first human-made spacecraft to reach another star system might fit in the palm of your hand. That’s the design engineers from the University of California, Santa Barbara are working on. The tiny craft, which weighs about as much same as a stick of gum, had its first test flight in April, where it soared more than 100,000 feet in the air. Its creators hope its successor will one day fly in space, perhaps even beyond the solar system to neighboring stars like Alpha Centauri.
Wafercr ...read more
Around the world, obesity is on the rise. A global uptick in body mass index, or BMI — a measure of whether a person’s weight is healthy for how tall they are — has coincided with rapid urbanization, leading to the assumption that urbanization is the main reason behind the global obesity epidemic.
Now, a large new report reveals the rise of global BMI comes from people living in rural areas rather than people living in urban areas. The finding contrasts the ...read more
Powered flight among living things has been around for hundreds of millions of years. Dinosaurs, and their relatives the pterosaurs, figured out how to take to the skies long before their avian descendants today did. Now, a new species of dinosaur is shedding some light on the evolutionary path that lofted reptiles skyward.
The fossil, discovered in Liaoning Province in China and named Ambopteryx longibrachium, is actually notable for the fact that it seems to be an altogether different e ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine