I don’t remember my first language anymore, or at least not most of it. When I was 2, I immigrated with my family into the United States from South India, and we all spoke Tamil. I didn’t know any English before I started school, so when my teachers noticed I was behind, my parents decided to stop speaking to me in Tamil. This was a common approach in the 1980s. Now, educators are more aware of the value of bilingualism.
I haven’t completely lost my connection to it. I still he ...read more
Experts are uncovering millennia of history under a Turkish megacity’s outskirts.
When Sengül Aydıngün first started surveying the shores of Küçükçekmece Lake in the western suburbs of Istanbul, colleagues doubted she’d find any evidence of ancient human settlement; other researchers had already surveyed the area and hadn’t turned up much. But the area’s geography and water resources looked favorable for early habitation, and he ...read more
It’s Nobel time: Committees traditionally announce the recipients throughout the month of October. In honor of this year’s winners, let’s take a look at some stats on laureates of bygone years. (This data excludes information related to peace, literature and economic sciences prizes.) ...read more
It takes a lot of pressure to recreate an erection like this. Photo by Vladimir Wrangel
Perhaps the hardest part about studying marine mammal reproductive anatomy using organs collected from deceased animals is that they can’t get an erection the easy way.
Reinflating human penises postmortem is a relatively trivial feat, says Diane Kelly, a research assistant professor at University of Massachusetts and penis inflation expert. Like most mammal ...read more
A drone hovers for a few seconds in the whale’s blow to collect a sample.(Credit: Michael Moore, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
While the SnotBot drone has been highly publicized for its aerial maneuvers over blowholes, but its expeditions have yet to showcase some hard data about whales. But there’s another whale snot-gathering team out there using drones—and they’ve turned those misty explosions into some interesting biological data about whales.
After collectin ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
