You might have heard that our world is out of balance. Ecosystems that need native plants and animals to flourish are plagued by human development and invasive species. Many of our local green spaces like yards, parks, and porches are home to mostly introduced, non-native plants that do little to maintain a healthy regional biodiversity.Want to restore native biodiversity? It’s possible, and the solutions are within reach: try rewilding your community with native plants. Mary Reynolds created ...read more
Have you ever said “I hate you” to someone? What about using the “h-word” in casual conversation, like “I hate broccoli”? What are you really feeling when you say that you hate something or someone?The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes the word “hate” as an “intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury.” All over the world, researchers like us are studying hate from disciplines like education, history, law, leadership, psychology, so ...read more
Animals sporting elongated curved canine teeth have appeared twice in the fossil record, millions of years apart. One lineage, the nimravids, went extinct about in North America about 23 million years ago. Then the saber-toothed tiger vanished about 8,000 years to 10,000 years ago. More recently, saber teeth have also evolved in “true” cats of the Felidae family.Scientists have long wondered why saber teeth emerged over different times and places, vanished, then re-appeared. A new study in C ...read more
Sometimes one clue at a crime scene can provide the key to unlocking an entire mystery. Such is the case with a single gold earring found inside a building that burned to the ground about 2,200 years ago in Catalonia, according to a report in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.The fact that the earring was hidden — both in a pot and in a nook inside a wall — suggests that its owners knew Hannibal’s Carthaginian army was heading their way. Because the earring was in one of the several b ...read more
Many people understand the concept of bias at some intuitive level. In society, and in artificial intelligence systems, racial and gender biases are well documented.If society could somehow remove bias, would all problems go away? The late Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who was a key figure in the field of behavioral economics, argued in his last book that bias is just one side of the coin. Errors in judgments can be attributed to two sources: bias and noise.Bias and noise both play important r ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine