The Ice of Mercury
Mercury, the closest planet to our sun and the second hottest, also has glaciers. That may come as a surprise, but it's due to the fact that the planet has no tilt, and so the bottom of some deep craters near the poles are left permanently shadowed. With no atmosphere, the planet's night side quickly loses heat and dips far below freezing, allowing ice to form and accumulate in regions that never see the sun.
Now, new models reveal incredible details about how glaciers f ...read more
What if your ability to feed yourself was dependent on a process that made a mistake 20 percent of the time?
We face this situation every day. That’s because the plants that produce the food we eat evolved to solve a chemistry problem that arose billions of years ago. Plants evolved to use carbon dioxide to make our food and the oxygen we breathe – a process called photosynthesis. But they grew so well and produced so much oxygen that this gas began to dominate the atmosphere. To pl ...read more
Dear Librarian,
Libraries and similar venues are public spaces where community members, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, economic level, or education level, can engage in a variety of activities. May we suggest citizen science, which enables ordinary people to advance real scientific research? Professional scientists need your help, and connecting through citizen science projects offers robust opportunities for patrons to address local or global concerns and to stoke ...read more
Today, when we've unlocked the secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya writing and hosts of far lesser known scripts, it seems as though there's nothing left for enterprising epigraphers. Fear not, for there are actually a number of ancient writing systems still to be cracked. They include texts of the Olmec and Zapotec (Mesoamerican cultures preceding the Classic Maya), Proto-Elamite (writings of the earliest civilization of present-day Iran) and Rongorongo of Easter Island.
But if it's fa ...read more
For more than a hundred years, the United States government has paired university scientists with local farmers to study how best to feed the world.
These extension programs helped to more than double agricultural production in the U.S. between 1948 and 2001 by sharing knowledge between farmers and university researchers.
These extension programs—which bring knowledge gained through research to agriculture and knowledge gained through practice to education—helped to more than dou ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine