California's dangerous Detwiler fire: The amazing GOES-16 satellite sees the blaze itself, not just the billowing smoke

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

With its vastly improved capabilities, the new satellite has the potential to save the lives of firefighters Heat and the massive smoke plume from California’s Detwiler Fire are seen in this animation of visible and infrared imagery from the GOES-16 satellite acquired on July 18, 2017. (Source: RAMMB/CIRA) For decades, satellites have been helping fire managers identify and monitor blazes, based on their smoke plumes and the hot spots they create in infrared imagery. But as the animation ...read more

Shark Survives Over A Year With A Hole Between Its Stomach And The Sea

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Think you could survive this? Photo ©Joanne Fraser/Ocean Artworks LLC Sharks are pretty incredible animals. They’ve lived on this planet for more than 400 million years, and in that time, come to dominate the oceans they inhabit. That kind of survival when so many other lineages have gone extinct requires serious resilience. Now, a lemon shark off Florida has shown off just how tough these animals can be: he survived for at least 435 days with a hole in his body created as ...read more

People Are Terrible at Spotting Fake Photos

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

We exist in a veritable flood of digital images, with at least 350 million a day uploaded to Facebook alone, and odds are significant number of those images are fake. And, given results from a recent study, most people can’t tell the difference. Can you identify the part of the top photo that’s been altered? Don’t worry, we’ll tell you later. Psychologist Sophie Nightingale and her colleagues at the University of Warwick used photo-editing software to doctor real-world p ...read more