Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
The full text of this article is available to Discover Magazine subscribers only. Subscribe and get 10 issues packed with: The latest news, theories and developments in the world of science Compelling stories and breakthroughs in health, medicine and the mind Environmental issues and their relevance to daily life Cutting-edge technology and its impact on our future ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
11. In 1868, Charles Darwin was the first to document a collection of physical and behavioral traits seen in domestic animals, particularly mammals, but not their wild relatives. 12. It wasn’t until 2014, however, that researchers offered a single explanation for the phenomenon of floppy ears, smaller teeth, tameness and other “domestication syndrome” traits: a mild deficit in neural crest cells.13 In vertebrate embryos, neural crest cells (NCCs) form along the dorsal side, or ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
(Credit: John Carnemolla/Shutterstock) If you want to get something done in an African wild dog pack, you’ve got to be ready to sneeze. The animals seem to make group decisions based on a system of explosive exhalations — “sneezes” — that determine if they get up and go on the hunt. If the dogs reach a quorum of sorts, they all fall in line — no “bless you’s” necessary. Sneeze If You’re With Me Researchers from Swansea University and ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
Closeup look at Hurricane Irma’s eye, acquired by the GOES-16 weather satellite. (Source: RAMMB/CIRA) As I’m writing this on Wednesday morning, the eye of Hurricane Irma — a “potentially catastrophic” Category 5 storm – has passed over the islands of Barbuda, Saint Barthelemy and Saint Martin, and was shortly headed for the Virgin Islands. I shudder to think what has been happening on the ground with the storm’s maximum sustained win ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
Photo: flickr/Kevin Dooley There are many ways to cope with being blind, from using a cane to adopting a seeing-eye dog. But some blind people have gone a step further and developed the skill of using mouth clicks to echolocate, in the same way that bats navigate in the dark. Here, a group of engineers studied exactly how these ‘human bats’ — or ‘bat men’, if you will — echolocate. They found that the clicks are very short (~3 milliseconds) and the freq ...read more