As of today, more than 5600 exoplanets, planets that are gravitationally bound to stars other than our sun, have been discovered. Within that catalog exists a vast array of planetary classes – small rocky worlds like our own, ocean worlds completely covered in liquid water, and gas giants that dwarf even Jupiter, among many others. Planets come in a range of sizes and compositions and are differentiated from stars primarily due to their inability to sustain nuclear fusion in their cores. So ho ...read more
Children with difficult temperaments, including personality tendencies such as irritability and having a hard time being comforted, are only slightly more likely than other children to have insecure attachment relationships with one or both of their parents, according to our research. This finding refutes the long-standing notion held by many psychologists that early attachment behaviors are mainly determined by a child’s temperament.An attachment relationship reflects the child’s expectatio ...read more
Ball lightning has fascinated and puzzled people for centuries. This rare and mysterious phenomenon, often described as a glowing sphere of light that appears during thunderstorms, has been the subject of countless anecdotes, scientific investigations, and debates. But is ball lightning even real? And if so, what causes it? Here, we’ll briefly dive into the basics of ball lightning, exploring what it reportedly looks like, how rare it is, what might cause it, and whether it poses any danger.Wh ...read more
Imagine this: You pick up your phone for a video call with a friend. Not only can you see their face and hear their voice, but you can also smell the cookies they just baked. It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, but could it actually happen?I’m a computer scientist who studies how machines sense the world.What Phones Do NowWhen you listen to music or talk to someone on your phone, you can hear the sound through the built-in speakers. These speakers convert digital signals i ...read more
Artists take inspiration from many sources. For the San people of South Africa, the spark that inspired some of their rock paintings may have come from fossils of creatures that went extinct more than 200 million years ago. A study in PLOS ONE says that not only did the San draw on bones of dicynodonts — large animals with downward-turning tusks that roamed the Earth before dinosaurs — but that they beat Western paleontologists to the punch. The “winged serpent” panel depicts a creature ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine