Ivan Ivanovich’s face obscured by the sign proclaiming him a dummy. via Astronautix
The countryside near Perm in the Soviet Union was rocketed by what sounded like an explosion in the afternoon of March 25, 1961. A capsule was falling from the sky, and before it hit the ground an ejection seat shot out, sending a passenger to a soft landing not far away. When recovery crews and volunteer helpers finally reached the landing site they rushed to the lifeless figure lying on the snowy gr ...read more
Mount Hora in Malawi, where researcher Jessica Thompson obtained the oldest African DNA ever successfully sequenced. (Credit Jessica Thompson/Emory University)
A great irony about Africa is that, even though it’s the birthplace of our species, we know almost nothing about the prehistoric populations who lived there: the bands of hunter gatherers who moved across the massive continent, interacting with and sometimes replacing other groups.
Today that changes.
Thanks to new research th ...read more
A global map from NASA of how Earth’s surface temperatures last month departed from the 1951-1980 August average. (Source: NASA GISTEMP. Note: part of Antarctica is gray because data from some stations there were not yet available at the time of this analysis.)
Last month was among the very warmest on record, according to two new analyses – and the heat is very likely to continue.
With less than four months left to go in 2017, the year will probably come in as second ...read more
Have researchers been as wrong about the dinosaur diet as famed illustrator Charles Knight was about hadrosaurs in this rather sketchy 1897 rendering? Duckbilled dinosaurs like this fella usually put four on the floor, and no dino dragged its tail or had the sprawling posture shown here. (Credit American Museum of Natural History)
Like that vegetarian friend of yours who sneaks a piece of bacon when no one’s looking, it appears that at least some dinosaurs previously though ...read more
(Credit: Iain Cameron)
Resting beneath the 1,000-foot cliffs of Scotland’s Aonach’s Beag mountain range, The Sphinx –one of the country’s proudest snowcaps—is on its deathbed.
“It’s a very sorry sight,” says Iain Cameron, a leading snow expert and arguably one of Edinburgh’s most dedicated “snow patchers,” a group of people who seek out and track the changes in the island’s coldest landmarks. These patches “tend to si ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
