How the Challenger Disaster Changed NASA

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

By January of 1986 America was already bored with spaceflight. It was, in part, NASA’s own fault. The government agency had debuted the space shuttle program five years earlier with an aggressive public-relations message that the reusable vehicles would make access to space both affordable and routine. Projected frequency: more than 50 flights a year. But had space flight become… too routine? Even as the shuttle undertook fewer than one-tenth that many flights, excitement quickly ...read more

No, the “Ring of Fire” is Not More Active or Even a Real Thing

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

"The Ring of Fire is really active!" Yup, that's what the headlines say. The supposed "Ring of Fire" -- the chain of volcanoes and earthquakes that sits at edge of the Pacific Ocean -- appears to be in the news a lot right now because of the eruptions in the Philippines and Indonesia and earthquakes in Alaska and California. However, this is all normal for these parts of the world, so let's not get all worked up about it. Let's start off with the basics: the "Ring of Fire" is not a thing, ...read more

Flashback Friday: Psychologists can give you false memories of having committed a crime.

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Photo: flickr/phphoto2010 You’ve probably heard of “false confessions,” when pressure from the police and long interrogations can make someone confess to a crime they didn’t actually commit. According to this study, it’s actually not that difficult to give someone a false memory of a serious crime. Here, researchers tried to make undergraduate volunteers believe they had committed a crime when they were younger by conducting interviews in which the researchers use ...read more

In Memoriam: Conversations with my Grandpa

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

For several months, my grandfather—Ralph Bianchi—has been battling stage four kidney cancer. On Monday, that battle ended when he passed peacefully in his sleep. While you can read his obituary in today's Boston Globe, a few hundred words cannot wholly capture his legacy. Ralph Bianchi was an engineer and pioneer who dedicated his career to cleaning up the messes of others.  I wrote the following post in June of 2010, when an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oi ...read more

Oldest Human Fossils Outside Africa Push Back Our Timeline…Again

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Time keeps marching on...backwards, at least when it comes to telling the story of human evolution and migration. The oldest human fossils found outside of Africa suggest our species may have left that continent 200,000 years ago. You may recall that 2017 was the year that the conventional timeline for human evolution and migration finally toppled thanks to overwhelming archaeological and paleogenetic evidence. Our species is much older, and left its ancestral continent of Africa much e ...read more