On a Wednesday morning in late January 1896, at a small light bulb factory in Chicago, a middle-aged woman named Rose Lee found herself at the heart of a groundbreaking medical endeavor. With an X-ray tube positioned above the tumor in her left breast, Lee was treated with a torrent of high-energy particles that penetrated into the malignant mass.“And so,” as her treating clinician later wrote, “without the blaring of trumpets or the beating of drums, X-ray therapy was born.”Radiation th ...read more
Like many of the researchers who study how people find their way from place to place, David Uttal is a poor navigator. “When I was 13 years old, I got lost on a Boy Scout hike, and I was lost for two and a half days,” recalls the Northwestern University cognitive scientist. And he’s still bad at finding his way around.The world is full of people like Uttal — and their opposites, the folks who always seem to know exactly where they are and how to get where they want to go. Scientists some ...read more
If space systems such as GPS were hacked and knocked offline, much of the world would instantly be returned to the communications and navigation technologies of the 1950s. Yet space cybersecurity is largely invisible to the public at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions.Cyberattacks on satellites have occurred since the 1980s, but the global wake-up alarm went off only a couple of years ago. An hour before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, its government operatives hacked Vi ...read more
Drive In movies are few and far between, but the summer blockbuster lives on. In this newsletter, check out our selection of summer citizen science projects paired with the films you’ll want to watch alongside them.Girls Night InFor the aptly named Eat Popcorn for Science project, you'll eat popcorn and watch a movie while contributing to important medical research (Credit: yousafbhutta via Pixabay)You can contribute to scientific research by inviting your friends, or science-curious pet, to w ...read more
Fatal attractions are a standard movie plot line, but they also occur in nature, with much more serious consequences. As a conservation biologist, I’ve seen them play out in some of Earth’s most remote locations, from the Gobi Desert to the Himalayan Highlands.In these locales, pastoralist communities graze camels, yaks and other livestock across wide ranges of land. The problem is that often these animals’ wild relatives live nearby, and huge, testosterone-driven wild males may try to mat ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine