Whether it was human sacrifice, treasure tossed into sacred sinkholes, or rituals surrounding resource extraction from the land, the ancient Maya had a rich worldview that involved a close reciprocal relationship with their gods. But what did the ancient Maya have to do to avoid the inconvenience of an apocalyptic reset, or at least keep the gods happy enough to favor new temples or even small homes? According to archaeologists, it depended a lot on the time, place, and scale of the occasion.Why ...read more
During her chemistry Nobel Prize lecture in 2018, Frances Arnold said, “Today we can for all practical purposes read, write and edit any sequence of DNA, but we cannot compose it.” That isn’t true anymore.Since then, science and technology have progressed so much that artificial intelligence has learned to compose DNA, and with genetically modified bacteria, scientists are on their way to designing and making bespoke proteins.The goal is that with AI’s designing talents and gene editing ...read more
Elephants engage in name-calling, according to a new report in Nature Ecology and Evolution. Unlike a few other animals — like dolphins and parrots — that respond to others imitating their signature call, an elephant’s name is its own separate word.This finding was born in the field, but confirmed with experiments. It’s been well established that one elephant can signal an entire group with what Joyce Poole, cofounder of Elephant Voices, a nonprofit organization that researches elephant ...read more
The Sun warms the Earth, making it habitable for people and animals. But that’s not all it does, and it affects a much larger area of space. The heliosphere, the area of space influenced by the Sun, is over a hundred times larger than the distance from the Sun to the Earth.The Sun is a star that constantly emits a steady stream of plasma – highly energized ionized gas – called the solar wind. In addition to the constant solar wind, the Sun also occasionally releases eruptions of plasma cal ...read more
The 2020s have already seen many lunar landing attempts, although several of them have crashed or toppled over. With all the excitement surrounding the prospect of humans returning to the Moon, both commercial interests and scientists stand to gain.The Moon is uniquely suitable for researchers to build telescopes they can’t put on Earth because it doesn’t have as much satellite interference as Earth, nor a magnetic field blocking out radio waves. But only recently have astronomers like me st ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine