Surprise Tsunami Hits Indonesia, Killing Hundreds

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

For the second time this year, an unexpected tsunami hit the coast of Indonesia resulting in hundreds of deaths. This tsunami may have been generated by an eruption of Anak Krakatau in the Sunda Strait, with Indonesian officials speculkating that an erupotion that occurred late last night may have triggered undersea landslides. So far, at least 220 people are known to have died , over 800 were injured and multitudes are missing. Many of the deaths were in Pandelang, located at the end of bay ...read more

Do You Believe in Eye-Beams?

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Do you believe that people's eyes emit an invisible beam of force? According to a rather fun paper in PNAS, you probably do, on some level, believe that. The paper is called Implicit model of other people’s visual attention as an invisible, force-carrying beam projecting from the eyes. To show that people unconsciously believe in eye-beams, psychologists Arvid Guterstam et al. had 157 MTurk volunteers perform a computer task in which they had to judge the angle at which paper tubes wou ...read more

Shrinking Planets May Explain Why Hot Super-earths Exist

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Astronomers have discovered a bizarre, Neptune-sized exoplanet located less than 100 light-years from Earth that's shedding its atmosphere so quickly it may help researchers finally answer the long-standing question: Where did all the hot Neptunes go? According to the new research, published December 13 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, the shrinking world, named GJ 3470b, is rapidly losing its atmosphere as it's bombarded by a steady stream of energetic charged particle ...read more

LingoBoingo: Play Games, Make the World Smarter

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Who doesn’t like playing games? What if you could play fun games online and in the process make the world a smarter place? That’s the idea behind LingoBoingo. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Linguistic Data Consortium and department of Computer and Information Science, the University of Essex, Queen Mary University of London, the Université de Montpellier, and the Sorbonne have teamed up to bring together a group of online games that contribute to ...read more

Could Extraterrestrial Sugar Explain How Life Began on Earth?

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Extraterrestrial Sugar Scientists have discovered derivatives of life's building blocks in carbon-rich meteorite samples, a first. They also showed how biological compounds can form in interstellar space. These new findings support the theory that life on Earth originated with help from cosmic impacts. Sugars and sugar derivatives are essential to life on Earth. But they, along with amino acids and other organic molecules, can be found in space as well, on asteroids and comets. Scient ...read more