To paraphrase Joyce Kilmer, you’ll never see an article as lovely as a tree, but this one should inspire you to go out and not only see trees, but help scientists working to understand and protect them. You’ll track down endangered trees for TreeSnap; monitor urban trees for ISeaTree; learn about trees with the Girl Scout Tree Promise project; spy on woodpeckers making their homes in trees with Woodpecker Cavity Cam; and help NASA and the GLOBE program discover how much carbon trees are capt ...read more
We all know what happens when we assume. Turns out that saying rings true for the folks who thought they understood the nature of the Pompeii residents killed in 79 C.E. after Mt. Vesuvius erupted and buried, then preserved their bodies in ash.The conventional wisdom held that Pompeii’s residents were wealthy Romans — either on holiday or enjoying their second home. That notion appears to be very, very wrong, according to a study in Current Biology.DNA Shows Diverse BackgroundsResearchers ex ...read more
The planet Jupiter has no solid ground – no surface like the grass or dirt you tread here on Earth. There’s nothing to walk on, and no place to land a spaceship.But how can that be? If Jupiter doesn’t have a surface, what does it have? How can it hold together?Even as a professor of physics who studies all kinds of unusual phenomena, I realize the concept of a world without a surface is difficult to fathom. Yet much about Jupiter remains a mystery, even as NASA’s robotic probe Juno begin ...read more
Life in the digital world can be rewarding. It’s convenient to order groceries for pickup, share photographs or music, and keep in touch with family and friends, no matter the distance. However, it can also be draining. The feeling of being constantly “on” and productive has driven people to reconsider their balance in the saturated digital world.More than 70% of American adults are concerned about how technology affects their mental health and personal relationships. This worry is reinfor ...read more
It’s important to use the right words when writing about writing.Scholars studying the history of it distinguish between pre-writing symbols used to mark objects and more precise marks that establish an exact correspondence between sign and sound; script and language are not the same thing.A new study in Antiquities illustrates the transition from printed symbol to written word — a metamorphosis that lead author Silvia Ferrara, a philology researcher from the University of Bologna calls “f ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine