(Credit: POLIGOONE/Shutterstock)
I don’t know who said “you are what you eat,” but it really doesn’t make sense. I am objectively not made of peanut butter and coffee, though I’m certain that would be my fate if the sentiment were true. That said, the general idea — that what we eat matters — seems to hold more and more weight as studies of our diet pile up. Now, researchers say there's yet another wrinkle to the question of what to eat, one rooted in ...read more
Wildfires blazing in Siberia, as seen by one of the Sentinel 2 satellites on June 11th. (Source: Copernicus Sentinel image data processed by Pierre Markuse)
I started writing this post last week after seeing the stunning satellite image above showing a blazing Siberian wildfire.
When I returned to finish the post today, I learned from a story in the Siberian Times that wildfires in this part of Russia's Sakha Republic are now threatening a spectacular landscape feature known among locals ...read more
A section of limestone riddled with burrows bored by a unique rock-eating shipworm. (Credit: Shipway et al 2019, Proc. R. Soc. B 20190434. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.0434)
What would a shipworm do if a shipworm didn't eat wood? The humble bivalve has long had outsized influence on both its environment and even the global economy. That's because, until now, every known species consumes wood, sometimes with destructive results.
A shipworm species new to science, however, tunnels th ...read more
One honeybee, ah ah ah... (Credit: yod67/Shutterstock)
Humans, monkeys, pigeons, fish and honeybees can all grasp the concept of a greater than or less than sign and choose between bigger or smaller quantities. Now, new research from a team led by Martin Giurfa at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France is the first to show that honeybees, like other vertebrates, can also recognize a specific value, not just a relative value. That means they know the number 3, instead of s ...read more
Solar flares and coronal mass ejections were more common when the sun was younger, but it may still have been quieter than many other stars like it. (Credit: NASA/SDO)
Stars, like humans, are more volatile when they’re young. As sunlike stars mature past their first billion years, they all tend to slow in their rotation, eventually converging to roughly the same period we see now in our sun: about 27 days for a star the same mass as our sun.
But when stars are young, they rotate mor ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine