Blakea attenboroughii (Credit: Darin Penneys)
Plants, they’re just like us.
We begin our lives as, really, parasites. A baby may bring some joy into the world, but it’s not contributing much beyond that. It takes feeding, cleaning, protecting, teaching and money to polish a human being into something approaching societal worth. After all, David Attenborough wouldn’t have been Sir David Attenborough without Frederick and Mary.Blakea attenboroughi shares at least one thing with ...read more
You don’t need hands to be right- or left-handed. Many kinds of animals have shown a preference for using one side of their body or the other. They include apes, whales, dogs, cats, cows, toads, fish and even honeybees. Now, with data from a rather unsavory source, researchers have found evidence for “tuskedness” in elephants.
Although humans aren’t alone in having handedness, we do seem to have the most extreme bias as a species. Other animals seem more evenly ...read more
And humans appear to have adapted those uses to their needs. At Middle Stone Age sites in South Africa, where ochre use was already complex about 100,000 years ago, different types of ochre were rubbed, ground or crumbled depending on the intended application and the individual rock’s hardness, which varies widely.
One of the obstacles to resolving how and why the rocks were used is in their very nature. “Ochre use by definition is destructive,” Zipkin says. “Generally wh ...read more
11. As for the Hope Diamond’s “curse”? Sorry, it was a made-up marketing ploy. On the topic of making things up, the first recorded attempt at synthesizing diamonds was back in 1880, when Scottish chemist J.B. Hannay heated sealed wrought-iron tubes that had been filled with a mix of oils and lithium.
12. Alas, the tubes were prone to exploding. Think of it as the first diamond boom! that was also a bust.
13. In 1955, however, labs at General Electric built on earlier research ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
