The town of Kabwe sits about 70 miles north of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, as the crow flies. Just over 200,000 people live in this major transportation crossroads. Like most of this south-central African nation, Kabwe is perched on a high and vast plateau, a land of red soils dotted with shrubby legumes and canopies of small, spindly miombo trees.
Kabwe’s story is defined in part by a mine that opened in the early 1900s after rich deposits of lead and zinc were discovered on the edge ...read more
Consider the humble grape. Small, spheroid, with pleasantly taut skin, leaving a burst of sweetness on the tongue. Hardly a fruit you'd need to defend yourself against.
Put a gently touching pair in the microwave, though, and the inoffensive fruit turns into a literal firecracker. Within just a few seconds, microwaved grapes will begin sparking as if electrified, and in some cases they'll even produce a flash of plasma bright enough to make the microwave glow from the inside out. ...read more
For the first time ever, astronomers think they've discovered an exoplanet that survived a catastrophic collision with another planet. And according to the new research, which was published Feb. 4, in the journal Nature Astronomy, the evidence for the impact comes from two twin exoplanets that seem to be more fraternal than identical.
Mass Matters
The pair of planets in question orbit a Sun-like star (along with two other planets) in the Kepler-107 system, which is located roughly 1,700 li ...read more
In the quest to fend off forgetfulness, some people build a palace of memory. It’s a method for memorizing invented in ancient times by (legend has it) the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, more recently made popular by multiple best-selling books (and the “mind palace” of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes).
Memory palaces provide imaginary architectural repositories for storing and retrieving anything you would like to remember. Sixteen centuries ago, St. Augustine spo ...read more
Valentine cards are filled with expressions of unequivocal adoration and appreciation. That’s fitting for the holiday set aside to express love and reaffirm commitment to one’s romantic partner.
But what if there’s more going on below the surface of these adoring declarations? How might thoughts and feelings that people are not even aware of shape their romantic relationships?
We are two psychology researchers interested in how the mind works, and how it affects a variety o ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine