Most ecologists agree that the earth is currently experiencing a mass extinction event. All over the world, living organisms are looking down the barrel of climate change, habitat destruction and exploitation. The most conservative estimates place the number of species lost per year at 10 times the “background rate” (which is calculated from when life began to now). Most extinctions go undocumented, but some are caught on the pages of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (I ...read more
The year 2023 proved to be an important one for space missions, with NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returning a sample from an asteroid and India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission exploring the lunar south pole, and 2024 is shaping up to be another exciting year for space exploration.Several new missions under NASA’s Artemis plan and Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative will target the Moon.The latter half of the year will feature several exciting launches, with the launch of the Martian M ...read more
In the hit dystopian TV series Severance, employees at biotech corporation Lumon Industries find it easy to separate work and home life. A computer chip is inserted in their brains to act as a “mindwipe”. They leave all thoughts of home behind while at work, and completely forget about their work when at home.While the show explores the pitfalls of such a split in consciousness, there’s no denying it’s a tantalising prospect to be able to “flick the off switch” and forget about work ...read more
One of the more expensive parts of the cameras built-in to smartphones is the lens system. That’s because lenses have to be made in an entirely different way to the electronic components that make up the rest of the phone.In recent years, physicists have hoped to change this with a new type of “metalens” that can be carved onto a flat sheet of silicon dioxide or similar material. Metalenses consists of pillars of silicon that are each about the same size as the wavelength of light. These p ...read more
Talking pets have been the darlings of social media recently. The trend started after Christina Hunger, a speech pathologist, made headlines when she adapted techniques she used with children to teach her dog, Stella, to communicate. Stella, and now hundreds of dogs and cats, use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) to “talk” with the humans in their lives. AAC takes the form of buttons affixed to a soundboard. When the pet presses a button, it plays a recording of a word, such ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine