Month by month, and season by season, global heating records continue to fall.After 2023 came in as warmest year (it wasn't even close), and 2024 started with record high temperatures, it should come as no surprise that February was weirdly warm too. The red line in the graph above shows the evolution of Earth's average surface air temperature for the year so far. The orange line shows the record for 2023, and the dashed one shows the average for 1991-2020. All years between 1940 and 2023 are de ...read more
(Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Marcia Rieke (University of Arizona), Daniel Eisenstein (CfA))Since December 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has unlocked various secrets of our universe. From providing newer images of galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope to enlightening experts on supernova remnants and peering into the early universe, the spacecraft has already discovered so much.Below are the latest ...read more
Up to half a century ago, researchers established that writing originated in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium B.C., and spread to the rest of the world, adapting to different languages. Since the 1970s, however, the decipherment of Maya and further discoveries has suggested that humans invented writing not once, but four separate times: in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica. In a recent study published in Nature, researchers at the University of Bologna in Italy have dated the wood o ...read more
“You don’t count your children until the measles has passed.” Dr. Samuel Katz, one of the pioneers of the first measles vaccine in the late 1950s to early 1960s, regularly heard this tragic statement from parents in countries where the measles vaccine was not yet available, because they were so accustomed to losing their children to measles.I am a pediatrician and preventive medicine physician, and I have anxiously watched measles cases rise worldwide while vaccination rates have dropped s ...read more
For many people in the ancient world, life was no casual stroll around the Forum. Today, many diseases can be treated with modern medicine or prevented entirely, thanks to the development of myriad vaccines to help rid us of the risk of infection (though major inequalities still mean such lifesaving shots are not available to all). In ancient times, however, these advances simply were not available, making disease an ever present and deadly risk. Kyle Harper, professor of classics and letters at ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine