This is a living representative of a primitive Glossata, moths that have a proboscid that suck up fluids like nectar. (Credit: Hossein Rajaei)
Think of some scaly animals.
Odds are butterflies didn’t come to mind. But butterflies and moths have scales on their wings, legs and bodies. Thanks to those scales, researchers have found the oldest known fossils of butterflies and moths, both in the order Lepidoptera, according to a paper published Wednesday in Science Advances.
While the Le ...read more
(Credit: David Stuart Productions/Shutterstock)
On a freezing morning in January, my boyfriend had just emerged from the icy waters of Lake Michigan along with hundreds of others who had just participated in the annual Polar Plunge. He was frozen to the bone, but so was everyone else. There was, however, something distinct about my boyfriend’s experience — the extreme cold triggered a new, mysterious allergy that would linger for years.
That summer, he took a dive into a cool lake ...read more
Research shows slow but steady increases in astronauts’ core body temperatures during their time at the ISS. (Credit: NASA/STS-130 Crew)
A great amount of time and effort is spent ensuring the mental and physical well-being of astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), and new research shows that increased body temperature is another factor to consider when evaluating astronauts’ health.
In the study, published January 5 in the journal Scientific R ...read more
A bird of paradise spreads it feathers as it engages in a mating dance. (Credit: BBC/Youtube)
Vantablack has been called the world’s darkest substance. When it was unveiled in 2014, the material made headlines for the way it seemed to leach objects of their three-dimensionality; it was so black that every feature merged into a black hole.
Darker than a black bear in a cave on a starless night, Vantablack looks downright otherworldly. But, humans are hardly alone when it comes to ink ...read more
(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
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
