This story was originally published in our Jul/Aug 2023 issue as "Breaking the Interspecies Barrier." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.On a warm fall day in 2021, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) surgeon Jayme Locke peered into a sliced-open abdomen and braced for the task ahead of her: transplanting two pig kidneys into a brain-dead human recipient for the first time in history. Locke had done experimental surgeries before, even putting pig kidneys into babo ...read more
This story was originally published in our Sept/Oct 2023 issue as "Cold Comfort" Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.One year before the U.S. Civil War ended, an embargo had brought the southern ice trade to a halt, causing the region’s chefs, bartenders, nurses and doctors to lose access to the northern ice they’d come to rely on for preserving food, making drinks and healing bodies. Without ice, the South was suffering.What they didn’t know was that 20 years bef ...read more
Most people will agree — moving is a pain. It’s exhausting to find boxes, pack up possessions, and haul them into a vehicle. Given the difficulty, most people stay put in their residences for years at a time.But living in the same location is a relatively new human experience. For hundreds of thousands of years, people were nomadic. They sometimes stayed in a place for mere hours before moving on.Eventually, most people gave up the nomadic lifestyle. Scientists are still learning about ancie ...read more
Imagine that you're looking up at the night sky — and instead of spotting a single moon above you, you see two glowing orbs instead.In this alternate reality, one of these celestial bodies is about the size and brightness of our present-day moon, but the second appears four times bigger and brighter. From this secondary moon's surface, fountains of magma erupt from volcanoes, creating space debris that enters our atmosphere to produce meteor showers more spectacular than any we know today.Thes ...read more
Hey everyone, Stephen Hawking is throwing a party, and we're all invited! One catch: Stephen Hawking is dead, and the party was in 2009. Still, the invitation stands.What if you threw a party and nobody came, but that's exactly what you expected? That's precisely what famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking did on June 28, 2009. He rented a space at Cambridge University and got balloons, decorations, and, of course, the champagne. Then he sat in the empty room for a few hours and left. Only then ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine