Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
Even though technology has helped measure strength and flag strike zones, earthquakes still have a few mysteries that rattle experts. ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
New research into the cephalopod genome is undermining our assumptions about evolution, and the role that DNA mutations play in updating a species' physiology. Researchers from the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and Tel Aviv University have been studying how cephalopods — squids, octopuses, cuttlefish and nautiluses — edit their genome, and found that instead of relying on DNA mutations to adapt, they have the ability to make changes to their RNA, the genetic "messe ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
A case of left-right confusion misled researchers about how dogs process language. Last August, Hungarian neuroscientists Atilla Andics and colleagues reported that the left hemisphere of the dog brain is selectively activated in response to the lexical properties (i.e. the meaning) of spoken words. This result was very interesting, not least because lexical processing is also lateralized to the left hemisphere in most humans. The paper appeared in the prestigious journal Science. However, ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
On the list of exoplanets that could hold life, GJ 1132b wouldn’t come near making the cut. It’s a super-Earth whose upper atmosphere reaches 500 degrees Fahrenheit (260 degrees Celsius), meaning it only gets hotter as you move down. It’s barely a hair away from its star, completing a year in 1.6 Earth days. Life is incredibly unlikely to survive there. Yet it may be one of the most important planets to come along in the search for life. So why’s that? Well, it’s ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
As I write this, a conglomeration of radio telescopes scattered across Earth are acting as one giant instrument to try to image the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. It’s no easy feat. A black hole, by definition, is so dense and the gravitational pull so strong that not even light can escape its confines. So how can an object that can’t emit light and that doesn’t reflect light be observed? By looking for its shadow, and that’s exactly what the so-call ...read more