Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
Researchers show off another side of their work in the 2017 Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council photo competition. ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
Can neuroscience help courts to decide how criminals should be punished? Is moral responsibility, or the lack of it, visible on a brain scan? In The Brain Defense (Penguin, 2017, on sale now), author Kevin Davis explores the growing use of brain images as evidence in American courtrooms. What Davis calls the “brain defense” is the strategy of using evidence of apparent brain abnormalities as a mitigating factor when defendants are convicted of violent crimes. If someone’s brai ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
A female seven-arm octopus carrying an egg-yolk jelly. Photo © MBARI The seven-arm octopus, Haliphron atlanticus, lives a hidden life deep in the dark depths of the oceans. These massive cephalopods—females of which can grow to be more than 12 feet long—earned the moniker for their habit of folding one of their eight arms away. What little is known of their daily lives has largely been gleaned from dead animals pulled from the sea by trawls, as inh ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
The mountain ridge on Iapetus has been a mystery since 2004. New simulations suggest it formed from rocky debris falling at shallow angles, which would allow for material to move down range and clump up into a continuous mountain range. (Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute) Moons in the solar system come in many different forms. Some are boulder-sized, while one is larger than the planet Mercury. Some are mixtures of rock and iron, while others hide oceans and rocky cores under icy surface ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
Requisitioned from farmers, blitzed with anthrax-laden bombs in the 1940s, and made inhospitable to human and animal life for decades, the tiny Scottish island of Gruinard now serves as home to a flock of healthy sheep and a disreputable monument to the birth of biological warfare. The research conducted at Gruinard during the second World War was the very first of its kind, providing proof of concept of a natural microorganism that could be massively weaponized to inflict environmental damage a ...read more