The Bronze Age saw the creation of complex societies and complex warfare, and served as the setting of some of the world’s most famous myths. In fact, the Aegean Bronze Age was the time of Achilles and Odysseus — of the legendary Trojan Horse and Trojan War — memorialized in the works of Homer. Not so mythical were the cultures that arose around the Aegean throughout the Greek Bronze Age, between 3000 B.C.E. and 1000 B.C.E., including the Minoan civilization on Crete and the Mycenaean civi ...read more
(Credit: James St. John/Flickr, CC BY)
The reconstructed skeleton of Lucy, found in Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974, and Grace Latimer, then age 4, daughter of a research team memberIn 1974, on a survey in Hadar in the remote badlands of Ethiopia, U.S. paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and graduate student Tom Gray found a piece of an elbow joint jutting from the dirt in a gully. It proved to be the first of 47 bones of a single individual – an early human ancestor whom Johanson nicknamed “Lucy. ...read more
The morning of January 12, 1888 was surprisingly warm in The Great Plains. The mercury rose above the freezing mark, melted ice dripped from roofs, and children left their heavy coats at home on their way to school. Across the region, people used the warm day to run errands or work outside.Thousands of people were caught unaware when a fierce blizzard suddenly transpired. Temperatures plummeted as low as negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and intense snow blinded those stranded outside. Hundreds of ...read more
For about 15 minutes on July 21, 1961, American astronaut Gus Grissom felt at the top of the world – and indeed he was.Grissom crewed the Liberty Bell 7 mission, a ballistic test flight that launched him through the atmosphere from a rocket. During the test, he sat inside a small capsule and reached a peak of over 100 miles up before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean.A Navy ship, the USS Randolph, watched the successful end of the mission from a safe distance. Everything had gone according ...read more
In the urgent quest for a more sustainable global food system, livestock are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, by converting fibrous plants that people can’t eat into protein-rich meat and milk, grazing animals like cows and sheep are an important source of human food. And for many of the world’s poorest, raising a cow or two — or a few sheep or goats — can be a key source of wealth.But those benefits come with an immense environmental cost. A study in 2013 showed that globally, livesto ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine