By: Megan Ray Nichols
It’s always fun to have a ladybug land on your arm while outside — but these days, it’s more and more likely that any ladybugs landing on you or the plants in your garden are not native to North America. Over the past three decades, several ladybug species native to North America have all but disappeared from the landscape. At the same time, other species, introduced from Europe and Asia, have proliferated. What’s happening to our native ladybu ...read more
Ghostly Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon. NASA.
A close look at the Apollo 11 EVA footage shows ghostly astronauts, which of course has launched speculation that the footage is faked. If NASA could get to the Moon, why couldn’t it capture good video?! The footage wasn’t faked. The poor quality and ghostly look is an artifact from the odd way NASA had to convert the lunar footage to a format that could be broadcast. To understand this, we have to unpack how exactly TVs work ...read more
A scientist creates a crowdfunding platform for other researchers.
Like many undergrads in science fields, Cindy Wu was intrigued by an academic career in research. After the biology major graduated in 2011, she worked as a research assistant at the University of Washington in Seattle, her alma mater. While there, she wanted to repurpose a treatment for anthrax to help clear up staph infections, but wasn’t sure how to get money for her idea. When she approached her adviser about it, W ...read more
The decrease in out-of-hospital cardiac arrests researchers observed in a pilot study of the Portland, Ore., area after the Affordable Care Act went into effect. Only middle-aged Portlanders, 45-64 years old, saw this benefit, though — the nearly universally insured elderly population, 65+, saw no changes.
How often men should knock boots weekly to potentially reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease. Doing the dirty deed seems to lower blood levels of homocysteine, an amino ac ...read more
The Inka Empire ruled millions without a written language. Keeping records was a knotty situation.
High in the Peruvian Andes, in the remote village of San Juan de Collata, sits a wooden box that’s sacred to the locals who keep close guard over it. It contains 487 cords of twisted and dyed animal fibers that, according to its caretakers, encode messages planning an 18th-century rebellion. Anthropologist Sabine Hyland was invited by community members to study the strings — the fi ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
