An aerial view of the Andes mountains in Argentina. (Credit: Nicolas Prieto/Unsplash)
There’s only one place on the planet where you can see flamingos roaming salt flats, vicuñas grazing in herds and condors soaring overhead, all as hot springs bubble beneath towering volcanoes. It’s the Altiplano of South America — a nearly 1,000-kilometer-long, otherworldly plateau that stretches from southern Peru through Bolivia and in ...read more
Artist’s illustration of the dusty disk of the early Solar System with an inset microscope image of a hibonite crystal. (Credit: Field Museum, University of Chicago, NASA, ESA, and E. Feild (STSCL))
Tiny crystals in meteorites were witness to the sun’s unruly behavior in its earliest years.
The sun sends a lot more than sunshine and rainbows our way. High-energy particles capable of messing with the nuclei of atoms stream off our star constantly. Earth&aci ...read more
Lockheed Martin’s Mars Base Camp is part of a vision to bring astronauts to the Red Planet. But to enjoy living there longterm, many scientists have long dreamed of altering the planet’s atmosphere. (Credit: Lockheed Martin)
Mars might not have the right ingredients to terraform into our planetary home away from home – even with the recent discovery of liquid water buried near its south pole.
Research published Monday in Nature Astronomy ...read more
Being a generalist specialist, a unique niche, is the hallmark of our species, say researchers — and the reason Homo sapiens (left) are still around but other hominins, including Neanderthals (right), are not. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Some animals are jacks of all trades, some masters of one. Homo sapiens, argues a provocative new commentary, are an evolutionary success story because our ancestors pulled off a unique feat: being masterly jacks of all trades. But ...read more
Kīlauea’s summit seen on a July 28, 2018 overflight, showing the deep new crater. USGS/HVO.
The eruption at KÃlauea has almost reached 3 months and in a sense, this eruption was a two-for-the-price of one. Most of the attention has been on the lava flows on the lower East Rift zone and rightly so. Those lava flows are the largest eruption in historic times at the Hawaiian volcano and have destroyed hundreds of homes, along with permanently altering par ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
