Chicory appears to be having a moment. Although the plant’s use has long been associated with New Orleans coffee, it is catching on globally. Some people are using it as a coffee supplement. Others are completely replacing coffee with chicory. And still others are adding it to other foods, for a variety of purported health benefits.Whatever the uses and reasons behind them, chicory sales are booming. One report estimated the global chicory market at $685 million in 2020 and is projected to hit ...read more
Our planet still can't seem to beat the heat.Last month was the warmest August on record. "Sweltering" was the word used by the normally staid National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to sum up the findings of its regular monthly analysis. And August wasn't just a one-off. By NASA's independent calculation, last month caps the hottest summer in the Northern Hemisphere since global record-keeping began in the 1800s. It also extends our planet's heat streak to 15 straight months of record s ...read more
Life and death are traditionally viewed as opposites. But the emergence of new multicellular life-forms from the cells of a dead organism introduces a “third state” that lies beyond the traditional boundaries of life and death.Usually, scientists consider death to be the irreversible halt of functioning of an organism as a whole. However, practices such as organ donation highlight how organs, tissues and cells can continue to function even after an organism’s demise. This resilience raises ...read more
If you haven’t given it much thought, you probably think non-human animals see the world the same way we do. The truth is the world looks very different to most other animals than it does to us.And this discrepancy between how non-human animals see the world and how we do can be a problem for wildlife biologists. To address this, Daniel Hanley, biologist at George Mason University and his team published their results in PLOS Biology on a new recording system that could help better capture how ...read more
Contemporary coelacanths are often described as living fossils. Superficially, that may be true. But new evidence now makes that nickname less valid. The two species of the large-boned lungfish alive today don’t look that much different than the first known coelacanth fossil dating back over 410 million years ago. But two new fossils show that the species did evolve — albeit slowly and subtly. Also, scientists for the first time link evolution to tectonic activity, according to a report in N ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine