Probiotics might not do as much for our bodies as we assume. (Credit: RomarioIen/shutterstock)
Plenty of people sing the praises of probiotics. These cultures of live bacteria can come in an array of products, from foods like yogurts to dietary supplements and even skin creams. Generally, these products tend to claim they’ll boost health by tweaking your microbiome, the collection of bacteria and other microorganisms that live in and on your body. And sometimes, doctors even encourage pe ...read more
Before deciding to dig up human remains, archaeologists must first ask themselves a complicated set of questions. (Credit: Masarik/shutterstock)
Banana was code for human bones, on one archaeological dig where I’ve worked. We were excavating a cemetery, several thousand years old, and had permits from the appropriate authorities. However, certain religious groups in the area had a history of protesting any destruction of burials, so we kept our work discrete.
We packed excavated skeleton ...read more
This artistically enhanced image shows a Hubble Space Telescope view of the active galaxy Arp 220, which houses a feeding supermassive black hole at its center. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Black holes are by nature difficult to study directly. Because even light cannot escape these massive objects, astronomers must turn to other methods to spot and study them. While information is lost once it crosses a black hole’s event horizon, outside that boundary, it can still escape. A recent study ...read more
This image shows V838 Mon, which exploded as a “red nova” in January 2002, suddenly becoming 600,000 times brighter than our Sun. A similar explosion was expected to occur in 2022, but the unprecedented prediction recently fell through. (Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI))
It’s time to face a hard truth. Good science is mostly about meticulously testing informed predictions. And, sadly, these predictions often fall flat.
This is exactly what just happened ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
