April marked the 388th month in a row that the global temperature was warmer than average

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

To find a month when the global average temperature over the land and oceans was below average, you have to go all the way back to December 1984, according to the latest monthly analysis from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Including April 2017, that makes it 388 straight months in which the global temperature has been warmer than the 20th century average. Like NASA's independent analysis released earlier this week, NOAA finds that last month was the second warmest ...read more

The Power of Office Rituals

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Anthropologists have long studied how rituals bind practitioners together. From African tribes moving rhythmically around a fire to the scripted kneeling and standing by Catholics during Sunday mass, participants deepen group identity through ritual. But ritual also spills over into business and social situations. “The great thing about ritual is that anywhere humans are, a ritual will be there,” says Nicholas Hobson, a psychology and neuroscience researcher at the University of Tor ...read more

Study reveals that women date men who look like their brothers.

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Incest is generally not a good idea because children born of closely related parents can end up with genetic diseases. But some amount of genetic similarity between parents can actually be evolutionarily advantageous, as genes that evolve together tend to work best with each other in a given environment. So how do people select "optimally similar" mates? Well, these scientists hypothesized that mating with a distant relative might satisfy both ends: the relationship would be distant enough ...read more

Polar eye candy: check out this spectacular aerial photo of a Greenlandic fjord from NASA’s Operation IceBridge

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

PLUS: a gallery of other compelling images from the mission I'm always looking for cool imagery to use here at ImaGeo, and today I stumbled on this photo. It's of a fjord in southern Greenland, taken during Operation IceBridge's final flight of the 2017 Arctic campaign, on May 12, 2017. Fractured sea ice floats between the towering cliffs, with a glacier visible in the far distance at the head of the fjord. NASA posted the image here today. I've done some modest processing to correct ...read more

Emerging Editing Technologies Obscure the Line Between Real and Fake

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

The image is modest, belying the historic import of the moment. A woman on a white sand beach gazes at a distant island as waves lap at her feet — the scene is titled simply "Jennifer in Paradise." This picture, snapped by an Industrial Light and Magic employee named John Knoll while on vacation in 1987, would become the first image to be scanned and digitally altered. When Photoshop was introduced by Adobe Systems three years later, the visual world would never be the same. Today, p ...read more