It has been a great week for humans banging on things around the solar system. Japan's Hayabusa2 probe touched down and grabbed a sample of asteroid Ryugu; NASA's InSight is hammering into the surface of Mars; and a private Israeli spacecraft named Beresheet is heading toward an April landing on the Moon. But we are just beginners at the game. Nature has been banging and moving things around in the solar system for billions of years--and doing it with impressive efficiency.
Case in point: ...read more
There are only so many hours in the day, and when work or school sucks up eight of them, it can be hard to squeeze in time for family, friends, exercise or binging Netflix. As a result, we often don’t get those eight hours of precious sleep during the week. But catching some extra z’s on the weekend can make up for it, right?
Wrong, say researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder. In a recent study, they found that catching up on sleep during the weekend doesn’t countera ...read more
It's easy to forget it, but much of the world is invisible to us. I don't mean that in the sense of things being really tiny, or in any metaphorical way. No, most of the world is literally invisible.
That's because what we call visible light is actually a tiny sliver of the much greater electromagnetic spectrum. The rainbow we see sits in the middle of a vast continuum of wavelengths, including everything from high energy gamma and ultraviolet radiation to much lower infrared and radio wa ...read more
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
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine