From eruptions in Iceland to Krakatau in Indonesia, there have been many volcanic eruptions making headlines in 2023. And we saw plenty of eruptions in 2022. From the Lascar volcano in Chile, Mount Semeru in Indonesia and Hunga Tonga in the South Pacific to the quiet eruptions of Mauna Loa, 2022 was quite the year for volcanoes.But, how can scientists predict volcanic eruptions before they erupt?While volcanic eruptions like Mauna Loa are relatively calm and cause minimal damage, eruptions like ...read more
If you’re going to take a vitamin every day, it might as well be tasty and fun, right? That’s why a lot of people prefer gummy vitamins over pills. But are gummies as safe and effective as pills?The answer is … maybe. For the most part, taking a basic multivitamin/mineral supplement is unlikely to harm your health and, for some people, might even do some good, says Stefan Pasiakos, Director of the National Institutes of Health Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS). But there are a few things ...read more
Back in 1970, the mathematician John Conway created a game with no players that evolves entirely from its initial state. The game is set in a kind of computational universe called a cellular automaton. This universe consists of an infinite grid of squares that can be alive or dead and that, at each time step, can flip from one state to the other according to the states of the squares around it. This cellular automaton has since become known as Conway’s Game of Life and famous for the extraordi ...read more
Stone came first. Then there was bronze. Then there was iron. Since the 1800s, scholars have split early human history into three separate “ages,” according to the main materials that hominins turned into tools and weapons. But what about wood? Was there ever such an age as the “Wood Age?”The answer is far from simple. Though there is no set period in human history that archaeologists have specifically identified as the “Wood Age,” scholars stress the sustained importance of the mate ...read more
Our understanding of cats, their behavior, and their ways of communication is still in its infancy. While cat domestication has been around for over 10,000 years, dating all the way back to Ancient Egypt, there is still a lot we don’t know about our feline friends. And the pets seem, at first sight, to have only one facial expression: aloof.But research is slowly catching up. A recent study carried out by researchers at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has found that when interacti ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine