In the desert town of Lajamanu, Australia, at the bend of a narrow dirt road, Carmel O’Shannessy worked at a school as a teacher-linguist in the early 2000s. Lajamanu’s Indigenous Warlpiri people, who live in the country’s Northern Territory, were skilled at drawing sustenance from the landscape’s parched red soil, and O’Shannessy soon discovered hidden cultural riches the Warlpiri had stored up.
As she got to know the children in the community, O’Shannessy n ...read more
In 1970, NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Centre was forced to address a tricky new issue in the realm of women in space: the validity of pants in the workplace.
Women and pants have a strange relationship throughout the 20th century, and further back, too, though for the moment we aren't going to get into Joan of Arc wearing men's armour. Pants — or trousers or slacks — began the last century as men's clothing, but it wasn't long before exceptions started to appear in th ...read more
(Inside Science) -- In a finding that mirrors the fantasy of HBO's “Game of Thrones,” French researchers working at the site of a third-century B.C. settlement have discovered evidence that Celtic communities decapitated and preserved human heads.
A team of archaeologists unearthed fragments of human skulls that they believe confirm a practice of deliberate decapitation. They concluded that the skulls were either war trophies or the result of a still little understood ritual practic ...read more
For decades, scientists have been on the hunt for brilliant galaxies in the distant universe. These quasars were first noticed for being spectacularly bright – some of the most energetic objects ever discovered. But astronomers think many of them – in fact, the vast majority from the early universe – may be in hiding, camouflaged behind much closer galaxies.
Because of their brightness, astronomers want to use quasars to probe the era of reionization. This is a ...read more
Planets, stars, and black holes all grow by consuming material from a spinning disk. While these disks may differ in size, they're all mostly dependent on the mighty force of gravity, which keeps them spinning around the central mass. Gravity lets small clumps grow into bigger clumps. But it's not enough to pull the whole disk into the middle in one giant clump, because angular momentum is pulling those clumps away from the center as they spin.
That's a good thing, because it means that t ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine