With their huge horns and their spike-spotted frills, triceratops weren’t the world’s friendliest-looking dinosaurs. But over a decade of digging at a fossil-laden bonebed in Wyoming has found a troop of five fossilized triceratops that lived and died together, supporting the long-standing suspicion that these dinosaurs were friendlier than they looked. The find serves as some of the strongest fossil evidence that these horned dinosaurs traveled in herds — a survival strategy potentially a ...read more
Social media is rife with recommendations to consume one supplement or the other. Promising to fill you with energy, enhance your memory, or more, these pills, tablets, drinks, and more can often stand on shaky scientific ground. Knowing which supplement is safe to take is essential.Vast amounts of supplements are consumed each year; one 2022 survey found that 75 percent of Americans take them, most on a regular basis. That means the industry rakes in billions each year. In the U.S., vitamin and ...read more
Though terrifying to people, spiders aren’t always treated with trepidation. Instead, for most of their predators, spiders are a safe snack — a tame and tasty treat — rather than a threat, forcing spiders to follow some pretty strange strategies for self-preservation.According to a new paper published in Historical Biology, some spiders take a particularly creative approach to protecting themselves from fearless predators, posing as much more threatening creatures: ants. The strategy is so ...read more
Mild cognitive impairment – an early stage of dementia – is widely underdiagnosed in people 65 and older. That is the key takeaway of two recent studies from our team.In the first study, we used Medicare data for about 40 million beneficiaries age 65 and older from 2015 to 2019 to estimate the prevalence of mild cognitive impairment in that population and to identify what proportion of them had actually been diagnosed.Our finding was sobering: A mere 8% of the number of cases with mild cogni ...read more
Humans have observed and tracked solar eclipses for millennia. In many cases, a solar eclipse brought on fear and foretold the end of the world or was a sign of great misfortune. To explain the causes of a solar eclipse, ancient humans would seek spiritual justifications and tell folkloric tales for why they occur. From these explanations, many myths and superstitions exist. Most of these are only myths and have since been disproven.Myth 1. Eclipses Are an Omen of MisfortuneMany of the beliefs t ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine