For ages, humans have ridden on horses, hunted alongside dogs, and curled up with cats, big and small. Along the way, humans have also managed to make companions out of far more unusual animals — from hissing snakes to wily ferrets to even colorful, ornamental fish.Nowadays, the exotic pet market and trade — both legal and illegal — have exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry. The U.S. alone is a major consumer, with over 11 billion animals imported into the country between the year ...read more
We all know too well how easily things get dirty. Dust gathers, and stains appear, seemingly out of nowhere. That’s no exception for the Animal Kingdom, either. But for some of these critters, staying clean isn’t just a matter of being comfortable. It’s also a matter of survival.The question of how animals manage to stay squeaky clean is something that researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology dug into in 2015 — and certainly, there are quite a few inventive evolutionary metho ...read more
To call King Tut’s genealogy complicated might be one of the biggest understatements in Egyptology. For example, Queen Nefertiti, once thought to be Tutankhamun’s birth mother, was actually his stepmother, as well as his mother-in-law. His parents were siblings and Tut’s wife may have also been his half-sister.Tut has fueled fascination ever since archeologists discovered his tomb in 1922. Although the Valley of the Kings burial place held over 5,000 artifacts, much of his heritage remaine ...read more
The fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex, the undisputed king of the Cretaceous, is easily the most famous dinosaur to have ever lived. Since its first fossil was unearthed in the late 1800s, T. rex has been immortalized in academic research, museums, and the public imagination. If your diet of T. rex knowledge comes strictly from pop culture, though, you might come away with a skewed perspective on what these titanic predators ate. (In the first Jurassic Park film, its seen chomping on a live goat, a rub ...read more
In the battle to build the world’s first useful quantum computers, one company has taken an entirely different approach to the other frontrunners. The conventional approach is to gradually increase the size and power of these devices and test as you go. But PsiQuantum, a startup based in Palo Alto, California, is gambling on the opposite approach. The company is investing heavily in quantum technologies that are compatible with chip-making fabrication plants that already exist. By using these ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine