Science Experiments for the Public during the Solar Eclipse

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

The two towers of the Schaeberle Camera and the rock wall at Jeur (India), with overlall height lowered by use of a pit for the plate-holder. Credit: Mary Lea Shane Archives By Dr. Liz MacDonald, founder of Aurorasaurus and scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. This blog reposted from blog.aurorasaurus.org. Over a century ago, American astronomer W.W. Campbell set up a 40 foot ‘Schaeberle camera’ in Jeur, India to take pictures and study various properties of the su ...read more

Despite an unusually chilly Arctic, and El Niño's absence, July 2017 tied for warmest such month on record

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

That makes last month one of the warmest our planet has experienced since record-keeping began in 1880 This graph shows how each month since 1880 has varied from the annual mean for the entire globe. The curve shows the seasonal cycle, with the warmest temperatures occurring during summer in the Northern Hemisphere. July 2017 tied with July 2016 for the second warmest such month on record — and was one of the warmest months in the record overall. (Source: NASA GISS) Up in the high north, ...read more

More on “Behavior Priming” and Unconscious Influences

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Last year, psychologists B. Keith Payne and colleagues breathed new life into the debate over ‘social priming’ with a paper called Replicable effects of primes on human behavior. Behavioral or social priming – the idea that subtle cues can exert large, unconscious influences on our behaviour – was a major topic of research for many years, but it’s since been largely discredited. The field’s reputation suffered when Diederik Stapel, a leader in the field, was ...read more

New Evidence for That Huge Dinosaur Family Tree Rewrite

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Chilesaurus diegosuarezi, a Jurassic herbivore at the heart of a controversial dinosaur family tree rewrite. (Credit Gabriel Lío) Remember that paper that dropped a few months ago completely rewriting the dinosaur family tree? Well, the researchers are back, this time using one of the odder dinos out there as evidence for their explosive claim. Is it legit or just hype? Back in March, researchers argued for a total takedown of the long-established dinosaur family tree. Today, Matthe ...read more

Scientists Cook Up Magic Mushrooms' Psychedelic Recipe

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Psychedelic mushrooms. (Credit: atomazul/Shutterstock) Scientists have known about psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” ever since Albert Hofmann isolated it in 1958. It’s taken until now, however, for them to figure out how it’s produced. Researchers at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany sequenced the genomes of two psychedelic mushroom species and used the information to identify four key enzymes involved in the process of ...read more