When I was a kid, I liked to dig holes in my backyard in Cincinnati. My grandfather joked that if I kept digging, I would end up in China.In fact, if I had been able to dig straight through the planet, I would have come out in the Indian Ocean, about 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) west of Australia. That’s the antipode, or opposite point on Earth’s surface, from my town.But I only had a garden spade to move the earth. When I hit rock, less than 3 feet (1 meter) below the surface, I couldn’ ...read more
The holidays offer many opportunities for awkward moments. Political discussions, of course, hold plenty of potential. But any time opinions differ, where estrangements have caused lingering rifts, or when behaviors veer toward the inappropriate, awkwardness can set in.Awkwardness is what happens in social interactions when you suddenly find yourself without a script to guide you through. Maybe the situation is new or catches you off guard. Maybe you don’t know what’s expected of you, or you ...read more
Orcas can get organized. When hunting for whale sharks — the world’s largest fish — a pod of killer whales appears to target the youngest most vulnerable sharks, ram them to turn them upside done — thus immobilizing them, and will then focus on high value organs like the heart and liver.Although there have been scattered reports of such incidents, scientists in Mexico recorded and studied four specific attacks, analyzed them, and described them in an article in Frontiers in Marine Scienc ...read more
We talk a lot about the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Rising sea levels, heat waves, melting glaciers -- they are all changes our planet is experiencing as the temperature rises. However, these can seem a little abstract if you're not experiencing them yourself. Sometimes it takes a concrete example of just how climate change is influencing not only changes to our landscape and ecosystems, but also to things like ... baseball.The Tampa Bay Rays play at Tropicana Field, a domed stadium ...read more
Scientists seeking the secrets of the universe would like to make a model that shows how all of nature’s forces and particles fit together. It would be nice to do it with Legos. But perhaps a better bet would be connecting everything with strings.Not literal strings, of course — but tiny loops or snippets of vibrating energy. And the “fit together” needs to be mathematical, not via properly shaped pieces of plastic. For decades now, many physicists have pursued the hope that equations in ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine