Why Do We Even Wear Pants?

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

(Credit: Seinfeld/YouTube screengrab) From far above, the area around Yanghai cemetery looks like a collection of ground-dwelling wasp dens, drilled into a gravelly desert. It gets hot in this region of remote western China — up to nearly 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and dry. That’s a hard-knock climate, but it’s perfect for preserving ancient artifacts. And if you zoom in on the region, and dig in, as archaeologists have, you’ll find tombs with well-kept secrets. Inside two ...read more

Floral Hackers: Plant Parasites Use MicroRNAs to Shut Down Host Genes

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

This parasitic plant turns off its hosts’ genes to hide its theft. Photo Credit: Stefan.lefnaer/Wikimedia Commons Organisms’ immune systems are constantly trying to detect and boot freeloaders. No living thing is particularly willing to give up its hard earned resources to just any moocher that comes along, so all parasites must find a way past their hosts’ defenses and survive incessant attacks. Some constantly disguise themselves to move about undetected, ...read more

While parts of the U.S. are wet and frigid, the Southwest is bone dry and still waiting for winter to arrive

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

A wide area around the Four Corners region of the U.S. Southwest is now in severe drought — and the three-month outlook is grim When it comes to snow cover, a comparison of satellite images shows just how much a difference a year can make. (Images: NASA Worldview. Animation: Tom Yulsman) While downtown Boston streets were flooding and then freezing as a result of the powerful bomb cyclone that pummeled the U.S. East Cost, folks in the U.S. Southwest were no doubt wond ...read more

Is It a Human or Computer Talking? Google Blurs the Lines

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

(Credit: Viktorus/Shutterstock) Siri and Alexa are good, but no one would mistake them for a human being. Google’s newest project, however, could change that. Called Tacotron 2, the latest attempt to make computers talk like people builds on two of the company’s most recent text-to-speech projects, the original Tacotron and WaveNet. Repeat After Me Tacotron 2 pairs the text-mapping abilities of its predecessor with the speaking prowess of WaveNet for an end result that is, fra ...read more