Giant Virus Found in Sewage Blurs the Line Between Life and Non-Life

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

In most biology textbooks, there’s a clear separation between the three domains of cellular organisms – Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryotes – and viruses. This fault line is also typically accepted as the divider between life and non-life: since viruses rely on host machinery to enact metabolic transformations and to replicate, they are not self-sufficient, and generally not considered living entities. But several discoveries of giant viruses over the last decade have blurred th ...read more

Engaging the public to tackle climate change

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Public engagement is critical to address the challenges of climate change, a complex issue with environmental, social, political and economic ramifications. Common forms of public engagement include public events such as science festivals or café informal settings for experts to share their knowledge with the community. Or public policy forums where community members voice concerns to government representatives and other decision makers. While useful, these approaches to public engagemen ...read more

Potentially Balmy Super-Earth Is a Tempting Case Study in Habitability

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

A new, nearby exoplanet could be just the boilerplate needed to find out if life could exist in untold numbers of star systems. The planet, LHS 1140b, is 39 light years away. It orbits a small M-dwarf star every 24 days. The planet itself is 1.4 times larger and 6.6 times more massive than Earth, and the principal investigators of the study published today in Nature believe it to be rocky. Standout Super-Earth Our list of exoplanets is long — nearly 3,500 strong, with new planets com ...read more

Untangling the Ancient Inca Code of Strings

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Two vibrant bundles of string, over 10,000 feet high in the Peruvian Andes, may hold clues for deciphering the ancient code of the Inca civilization. Kept as heirlooms by the community of San Juan de Collata, the strings are khipus, devices of twisted and tied cords once used by indigenous Andeans for record keeping. Anthropologists have long debated whether khipus were simply memory aids — akin to rosary beads — or a three-dimensional writing system. The latter seems more poss ...read more

Bee derived molecular shuttle is the newest buzz-worthy venom product

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

We human beings are quite fond of our brains. They are one of our largest and most complex organs, weighing in at nearly three pounds (2% of our bodies!). Each contains upwards of 90 billion neurons responsible for controlling our gangly, almost hairless primate bodies as well as processing and storing a lifetime's worth of events, facts and figures. So we protect our brains as best we can, from hats that battle temperature extremes to helmets that buffer even the most brutish blo ...read more