A 17th-century Russian nobleman named Butterlijn had a bone to pick with his surgeon. Butterlijn, the story goes, had been struck in the head with a sword, and his surgeon repaired the injury by transplanting a piece of dog bone into Butterlijn’s skull. He survived, only to be excommunicated by his church because he was deemed no longer fully human. Butterlijn demanded that the surgeon take the dog bone back out; when the surgeon tried, he found that Butterlijn’s skull had regrown ar ...read more
Everything old is new again in TV-land, as it so often is. Last week we learned that kids still watch more television than anything else, and this week a new study comes out confirming what many of us have long suspected: too much TV can rot your mind — if you're over 50. It’s like the 80s never left!
Now, to be fair, it’s all couched in the careful language of science, so technically it’s a decline in verbal memory that is associated with watching a specific amount of T ...read more
A NASA rover deployed to Chile’s Atacama desert has discovered microbes in one of the most Mars-like environments on Earth. It could prove helpful in the search for life on Red Planet.
The life that the rover found was adapted to extremely salty environments, much like those on Mars. Scientists also say the life was patchy, which they expected and called a basic rule of ecology. That's because nutrients and water tend to accumulate in pools. But finding that this also holds true in extrem ...read more
The last time Jim Murphy saw snow in Los Angeles, he was 11 years old. It was December, 1968 — a week or so before holiday break — and the already unruly class was stirred into a frenzy when one sixth grader spotted the flurries outside.
“Of course, everyone ran out of the classroom,” Murphy recalls. “The teacher had no control.”
Northridge, where Murphy grew up, is a neighborhood of Los Angeles that sits at about 800 feet above sea level. Snow is more comm ...read more
What color are these shells? The grove snail, Cepaea nemoralis, comes in a range of colors that can be roughly sorted into three groups: yellow, pink and brown.
Tracking color has been key to studying the evolution of this snail, however new research published in the journal Heredity highlights differences in the way humans see color that can make categorization a bit trickier (remember The Dress?)
“As scientists, to ensure the accuracy of our studies and the subsequent interpretat ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine