New Book Review Series
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
Select Category Select Tag Select Archive ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
Check Out This Beetle Trapped In Amber For 99 Million Years
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
The beetle Cretoparacucujus cycadophilus, trapped in amber along with grains of pollen for 99 million years, likely used highly specialized mandibles for pollination. (Credit Chenyang Cai) A new species of beetle, preserved in a piece of amber along with several grains of pollen, is the earliest direct evidence of an insect pollinating an ancient plant group nearly 100 million years ago. It’s also just supercool to look at. To understand why this new beetle with the gigantic nam ...read more
Sexually aroused by farts? You're not alone.
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
Photo: flickr/wackyvorion [Note from the authors of “Seriously, Science?”: After nine years with Discover, we’ve been informed that this will be our last month blogging on this platform. Despite being (usually) objective scientists, we have a sentimental streak, and we have spent the last few days reminiscing about the crazy, and often funny, science we have highlighted. Therefore, we have assembled a month-long feast of our favorite science papers. Enjoy! ...read more
Cracking Open The Hearts of Dead Suns
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
Neutron stars are extreme objects composed of 95 percent neutrons and five percent protons.(Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center) Neutron stars are the remnants of violent supernovas, all that’s left behind when a star tens of times the mass of our sun ends its nuclear fuel-burning life. These extreme objects pack more mass than our sun — about 1.4 suns’ worth of mass, to be more exact — into a stellar remnant about the width of a small city (6 to 12 miles [ ...read more
This Teeny, Tiny Galaxy is Hiding a Supermassive Black Hole
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
The tiny dwarf galaxy Fornax UCD3 (inset) orbits around a giant elliptical galaxy called NGC 1399. Astronomers used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to discover a supermassive black hole at UCD3’s heart. (Credit: Courtesy of NASA/STScI/ESO/Afanasiev et al.) A small galaxy some 70 million light-years from Earth has been hiding a big secret. This week, astronomers announced they’d found a supermassive black hole (SMBH) lurking at the center of a galaxy called Fornax UCD3. It’s ...read more