The War Over Reality
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
Quantum physics may be well understood, but scientists still don’t agree on what it means. ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
How to Follow a Fish
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
The tools researchers use to track their scaly subjects. ...read more
When Dinosaurs Went Bad
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
In 1842, English anatomist Richard Owen proposed the term dinosauria for the strange animal fossils he and colleagues had begun to study. Owen drew from ancient Greek to create the word: deinos, meaning “terrible” in the awesome-to-behold sense, and sauros, “reptile” or “lizard.” The truth is, those early paleontologists — and generations of their successors — got those terrible lizards, well, terribly wrong: T. rex as a tail-dragging lunk, tank-li ...read more
Where's the Lab-Grown Beef?
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
While Mark Post, physiology chair at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, shares Mironov’s optimism about in vitro meat’s potential, he says the future isn’t in at-home devices.“Quite frankly, I don’t see that as a very pragmatic solution,” says Post, whose name has become synonymous with the movement. He debuted his lab-produced meat (cost: $325,000 per burger) in a highly publicized taste test in London in 2013.Instead, the focus now is on ramping up ef ...read more
The Origins of an Ancient Fairy Tale
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
Once upon a time in Asia Minor, people started to tell the tale of The Smith and the Devil. The plot was simple: A craftsman trades his soul for supernatural power, then uses his magic to trap the diabolical creature with whom he made the deal. Folklorists, including the Brothers Grimm, have long assumed the story, as well as other tales such as Rumpelstiltskin and Beauty and the Beast, is ancient. Now, there’s firm evidence for that from Durham University anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani an ...read more