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You’re bombarded with sensory information every day — sights, sounds, smells, touches and tastes. A constant barrage that your brain has to manage, deciding which information to trust or which sense to use as a backup when another fails. Understanding how the brain evaluates and juggles all this input could be the key to designing better therapies for patients recovering from stroke, nerve injuries, or other conditions. It could also help engineers build more ...read more
(Credit: NASA)
Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has been a jumping-off point to our understanding of galaxies throughout the universe. And though our picture of that home galaxy has evolved over time as astronomers have developed better ways to catalog and map its contents, we’ve largely believed the Milky Way was a “typical” example of a spiral galaxy. Now, astronomers are taking steps to determine whether that’s really true.
New data from the Satellites Around Galactic ...read more
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A small dot on an old piece of birch bark marks one of the biggest events in the history of mathematics. The bark is actually part of an ancient Indian mathematical document known as the Bakhshali manuscript. And the dot is the first known recorded use of the number zero. What’s more, researchers from the University of Oxford recently discovered the document is 500 years older than was previously estimated, dating to the third or fourth century – a breakthroug ...read more
Is he one of the lucky ones? (Credit: Shutterstock/Herman Veenendaal
Dating is a tough game. No matter where you go, it seems like there’s always someone who’s more attractive, funnier or remembers to shower. Losing out sucks, but hey, at least you get to keep your penis.
Not so for ruddy ducks. They only grow penises during mating season, and when forced to compete for mates, the scrawnier ducks don’t even bother to put in much effort. Some ruddy ducks can grow pen ...read more
But despite claims to the contrary, one warmish summer in the Arctic does not repeal the long-term trend of human-caused warming
This visualization shows how the extent of Arctic sea ice has evolved through time. The animation begins when the ice reached its wintertime maximum extent on March 7, 2017, and it ends on September 13, 2017, when the ice shrank to its minimum extent for the year. (Source: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio/Helen-Nicole Kostis)
Arctic sea ice has sta ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
