Australia and South America weren’t always so separate. At one time, many millions of years ago, these two continents were connected, along with others, in the southern supercontinent of Gondwana. Gondwana was a warm, forested place — a perfect home for tree frogs. In fact, the supercontinent fostered the common ancestor of the Australian pelodryadid frogs and the South American phyllomedusid frogs that are still seen, stuck to leaves and branches, today. But when did this common tree frog a ...read more
If you’ve stayed in a bath or pool long enough, you’ve likely noticed your skin, especially your fingers, become wrinkly or pruny. This is caused by your blood vessels contracting. When blood vessels narrow, the skin’s area is reduced, and your skin forms wrinkles. While your pruny fingers may seem off-putting, this evolutionary advantage actually helps you grip things easier underwater, compared to non-pruny hands. However, as your fingers wrinkle underwater, do they always wrinkle in th ...read more
A sandstone slab imprinted with clawed footprints could mean that four-legged animals (tetrapods) transitioned from sea to land 35 million years earlier than previously thought. That finding of the earliest known clawed footprints — in Australia, by amateur paleontologists — may have major evolutionary implications, according to a paper in the journal Nature."I'm stunned," Per Ahlberg, a researcher from Uppsala University and an author of the paper, said in a press release. "A single track-b ...read more
NASA’s Magellan mission is one of the most successful deep space missions of all time. The spacecraft provided the first and most complete image map of the surface of Venus, and the most comprehensive and detailed data of the planet’s gravity and surface.Although the original mission launched in 1989, the data collected is still helping scientists with new discoveries. Recently, a team used the archival Magellan data to find evidence that tectonic activity is happening below Venus. This acti ...read more
Monitoring wastewater for traces of infectious diseases is giving this human byproduct a powerful new role in public health. Once used decades ago to detect poliovirus, wastewater-based epidemiology reemerged during COVID-19 and is now proving useful again in tracking measles outbreaks before cases are officially reported.A recent study led by researchers from Baylor College of Medicine, UTHealth Houston, the Houston Health Department, and Rice University showed that measles virus was detected i ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine