Over the past two decades, a troubling pattern has emerged: more young adults are being diagnosed with colorectal cancer — a disease traditionally seen in people over 50. If this trend continues, early-onset colorectal cancer could become the leading cause of cancer-related deaths among young adults within just five years.What's causing this surge remains unclear. With few genetic links and no consistent risk factors like obesity to blame, scientists have started looking beyond lifestyle and g ...read more
The most powerful instrument of its kind has now taken its first picture of the sun. Although the Inouye Solar Telescope began operating from its perch on the Hawaiian volcano Haleakala in 2022, the addition of its latest key piece of equipment provides a major boost to its spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution to the most powerful telescope of its kind in the world. This will increase its ability to visualize eruptions on the sun’s surface. Those storms hurl particles and radiation into ...read more
It’s one hell of an old ant. Researchers discovered a 113-million-year-old hell ant preserved in a chunk of Brazilian limestone. The find earned it the title of the oldest such specimen, according to a paper in the journal Current Biology. The fossil is a member of Haidomyrmecinae — an extinct subfamily from the Cretaceous period. Those insects were armed with scythe-like jaws that researchers suspect the ant deployed to pin down or impale its prey.“What makes this discovery particularly i ...read more
In 2018, a study made headlines when it found that a captive orca, or killer whale, was able to imitate human speech. The whale, called Wikie, lived at the Marineland Aquarium in Antibes, France. Wikie was trained to produce the words "Ah ah," "hello," "Amy," and "one two three." (Wikie could also make a sound like a creaky door and imitate the call of an elephant.)It really shouldn’t be surprising that whales have a knack for imitating speech. They’re very auditory animals, explains Deborah ...read more
Melting glaciers in North America 10,000 years ago may have given continental drift a bit of a push. Similar activity in Greenland now could eventually trigger volcanic eruptions in Iceland.Geoscientists modeled a chain of events that demonstrate how sea level rise impacts plate tectonics, they report in the journal Nature.“As ice volume was greatly reduced, it caused a huge motion in Earth’s crust,” Tao Yuan, a graduate student at Colorado University, Boulder, and an author of the paper, ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine