A section of the Gorgan Wall in the hills. (Credit: Arman Ershadi)
Golestan Province in Northern Iran is a unique landscape. Sandwiched between the temperate forests of the Alborz Mountains and the Caspian Sea, a narrow corridor connects Persia with the desert steppes of Central Asia. The passage measures 120 miles across from sea to mountain, and it’s made of fertile rolling plains rising to windswept hills. The ancient name for this place was Gorgan (گ&Os ...read more
Satellite image of green vortex swirling in the Gulf of Finland on July 18. (Source: NASA Earth Observatory)
I hope you’ll excuse the exaggerated exuberance in the headline, but when I saw the image above, and then the animation lower down in this story, my first reaction really was to exclaim out loud “whoa!�
I was really struck by the two very curious whirlpool-like features on opposite sides of Earth — one giga ...read more
A California two-spot octopus. (Credit: Greg Amptman/Shutterstock)
A neuroscientist and a marine biologist got together and decided to give octopuses MDMA. It sounds like a joke, but it really happened, and the results reveal something unique about our neurocircuitry and human evolution.
Eric Edsinger is an octopus researcher at the University of Chicago who recently helped sequence the genome of Octopus bimaculoides—the California two-spot octopus. Like most octopuses, this ...read more
(Credit: mimagephotography/shutterstock)
Seeing a smile can make a person unconsciously smile in return, and now scientists find that digitally mimicking the voice of a smiling person can also make people reflexively smile.
Charles Darwin and his contemporaries were among the first scientists to investigate smiles. Darwin suggested that smiles and several other facial expressions are universal to all humans, rather than unique products of a person’s culture.
â€&oe ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
