Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
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Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
Earth, seen as the faint dot in a sunbeam, is 4 billion miles away in this image from Voyager 1. (Credit: NASA/JPL) We first glimpsed Earth’s curvature in 1946, via a repurposed German V-2 rocket that flew 65 miles above the surface. Year-by-year, we climbed a little higher, engineering a means to comprehend the magnitude of our home. In 1968, Apollo 8 lunar module pilot William Anders captured the iconic Earthrise photo. We contemplated the beauty of our home. But on Valentine’s D ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
What do I love most about this artist rendering of a pregnant Dinocephalosaurus? Is it capturing the marine reptile’s epic neck-to-body proportion? Is it the tasteful allusion to the offspring in her belly? No, it’s the freshly chomped fish in her mouth, and the bloody cloud around it. Nom nom nom. Don’t mess with Mom when she’s hungry. Credit: Dinghua Yang & Jun Liu. Here’s some egg-citing news: for the first time in the fossil record, researchers have discove ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
Last week Retraction Watch covered a case of a psychology paper that was retracted after it emerged that the graduate student who collected the data had faked the results. Here’s the retraction notice: The retraction follows an investigation by the University of Alabama’s Office for Research Compliance. That investigation found that a former graduate student in William Hart’s lab altered the data in strategic ways. The investigation found that William Hart was unaware wh ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
A crater at Northeast Syrtis, one of the shortlisted landing sites for the Mars 2020 rover. (Image: NASA/HiRISE/University of Arizona) The Curiosity Mars rover is in the prime of its robotic life, approaching dramatic layered deposits on the slopes of Mt. Sharp. But even as the four and a half year-old mission reaches the features it was initially sent to investigate, scientists and engineers are feverishly planning for the next rover mission, Mars 2020. 2020 is shaping up to be a busy year on ...read more