One million species are threatened with extinction, more than ever before in human history, according to a landmark report released Monday from the United Nations. And humanity is responsible.
"Ecosystems, species, wild populations, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are shrinking, deteriorating or vanishing," said Josef Settele, an ecologist at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Germany, who co-chaired the new assessment, in a statement. "Th ...read more
At the start of World War I, thousands of soldiers were coming down with a baffling condition: they became blind, deaf, lost their memory, or developed uncontrollable shaking despite no obvious physical injury. Even stranger, this malady could be triggered by memories of the war even after the fighting had ended. At the time, doctors called what they were seeing “shell-shock,” though today we would call it by a different name: post-traumatic stress disorder. Anything that brought bac ...read more
(Inside Science) -- One of the strangest things about quantum mechanics is that a particle can act like a wave. In particular, in a double-slit experiment, individual particles that are shot through a pair of slits create a pattern as if they each went through both slits simultaneously and interfered with themselves. Researchers have now shown for the first time that antimatter behaves in the same unintuitive way.
Antimatter particles correspond to the regular particles that we are used t ...read more
Before the planets in our solar system formed or the sun turned on and started shining, two other stars had to die. Their deaths and later collision would seed the area where our area with many of the heavy materials needed for life on Earth. Now, 4.6 billion years later, astronomers are piecing together the story of these long-dead stars.
To do this, researchers studied different ways to make the heavy elements in question – exploding stars or violent collisions between st ...read more
Rod Serling knew all about dimensions.
His Twilight Zone was a dimension of imagination, a dimension of sight and sound and mind, a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity. It was all very clear except for the space and time part, the dimensions of real life. Serling never explained them.
Of course, ever since Einstein, scientists have also been scratching their heads about how to make sense of space and time. Before then, almost everybody thought Isaac Newton had figur ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine