If you’ve been tuning into the recent news, perhaps you’re aware that NASA recently made the difficult decision to delay bringing astronauts from the International Space Station (ISS) home on Boeing’s Starliner capsule. The reason? Safety concerns. The spacecraft encountered several technical issues that teams on the ground simply couldn’t overlook. As a result, astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been instructed to remain in orbit – at least until a pod from SpaceX, a long ...read more
One of the great endeavors of modern science is to understand the brain. This organ, the most complex machine we know, is a miracle of evolutionary biology. It processes a potent firehose of information to set goals, achieve tasks and navigate complex environments, often in ways that put the world’s most powerful supercomputers to shame. Remarkably, it weighs about the same as a bag of flour and runs on little more than a bowl of porridge.And yet, at the heart of this amazing capability is a p ...read more
It’s an old platitude and hoary chestnut: Life is all about balance.But sometimes we can find wisdom in even the most tired cliches. Balance is especially true in terms of managing your body’s intake of its two most abundant minerals: phosphorus and calcium.Although they each have specific functions, they work together to build and maintain strong bones and teeth. And each mineral’s efficacy depends on the amount of the other. Too much phosphorus or not enough calcium in your diet can incr ...read more
Up until recently, humans have been known as the only species to surgically remove limbs to increase a wounded individual’s chances of survival. Chimps have medically treated injuries of the wounded, ants have carried inebriated nest mates home to sleep it off — but selectively amputating limbs to save the life of another is distinctly a human behavior.But Erik Frank, a biologist at the University of Würzburg, recently discovered that when the leg of a Camponotus floridanus ant was injured, ...read more
Judging only by the blistering summer sun, you’d be forgiven for assuming that space is a hothouse. But despite the tremendous energy pouring out of trillions and trillions of stars, our universe is surprisingly arctic.To understand why, we first need to wrap our heads around temperature because its true nature isn’t obvious when you burn your hand on the stove or dive into an icy lake. When scientists talk about hot and cold, they’re referring to the average kinetic energy of a system (wh ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine