When you think of psychedelic drugs like psilocybin or lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), you might imagine an array of mind-boggling visuals. Yet psychoactive substances can be good for more than just a tremendous trip. For thousands of years, they’ve been used to treat psychological disorders and promote well-being. In fact, when taken in small doses, experts say they can even produce comparable effects to antidepressants. Called microdosing, this idea is nothing new, but it’s taken off i ...read more
An EF-4 tornado carved a path of destruction through Greenfield, Iowa, on May 21, 2024. With peak winds of 185 miles per hour, the twister's rampage through the little town is visible in this image captured by the Sentinel 2 satellite on May 25. (Credit: Modified Copernicus Sentinel data processed by Tom Yulsman)It has been quite a spring for twisters in the United States. So far this year, the preliminary tally from the Storm Prediction Center has reached 1,035 tornadoes, with 872 of them occur ...read more
Houston just can't seem to catch a break. After a band of extreme thunderstorms rampaged through on May 16, knocking out power to large parts of the city, new storms have caused continuing misery there — and, for that matter, large swaths of the Lone Star State and beyond. On Tuesday, May 28, powerful storms pummeled Texas with high winds and baseball-sized hail, tragically causing one death. Houston was not spared: Streets were flooded for the second time in two weeks, and more than 100,000 C ...read more
The French Broad River winds through the mountains of western North Carolina, fed by dozens of mountain streams, and crosses the city of Asheville. At over 2,000 feet above sea level and more than 250 miles from the coast, it is an unlikely place to prepare for a hurricane.Yet, the remnants of several hurricanes have swept through this region over the years, sending rivers in the region raging out of their banks.When these storms hit back to back, the devastation can be enormous. In September 20 ...read more
Plato’s Theory of Forms addresses the question of how we know that an object, such as a table, is what it is, even though we may never have seen it before and even though it might look entirely different to any table we have ever seen. Plato’s answer is that a table gets its “tableness” because it partakes of the perfect Form of a table. This Form is an ideal, absolute, timeless entity that is the essence of tableness but that we cannot experience directly. In his Allegory of the Cave, P ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine