People quite literally have plastic on their brain — or, more accurately, in it. A new study detected microplastics in human brains at much higher concentrations than in other organs. Microplastics are tiny pieces of broken-down polymers. They are building up in the air, water, and soil. They have also been detected in human livers, kidneys, placentas, and testes.However, their accumulation in the brain appears to be increasing much faster and at higher concentrations than in those other organ ...read more
We tend to think of magnets as binary. Batteries have positive and negative ends. Compasses point north and south. And, until late last year, there were two kinds of magnetism: ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism.Late in 2024, scientists discovered a third kind: altermagnetism. This class of magnetism — which has some characteristics of the other two — could greatly increase computer memory storage, and, in doing so, also save on both energy and rare earth materials. It could also boost th ...read more
In 1862, an American antiquities dealer was in an Egyptian marketplace, squinting at a scroll. The scroll was written in hieratic, a type of ancient Egyptian cursive, and the dealer, Edwin Smith, wasn’t fluent enough to decode the text. Smith sensed the scroll had great value, and he also suspected the merchant selling the ancient text didn’t recognize its value. Smith purchased the papyrus and returned to buy additional pieces he later identified as a continuation of the scroll.Now known a ...read more
In 1997, Jeanne Calment set the record for the longest recorded time a person has lived, passing away at the age of 122 years old. So far, no one has broken this record. But even before Calment, the 20th Century heralded the last radical expansion of human lifespans thus far, spawning what some researchers call the “longevity revolution” by skyrocketing our chances of living longer. Thanks largely to improvements in medicine and public health measures, the average life expectancy is no longe ...read more
Outer space could use a set of traffic laws — and cops who can enforce them.The amount of both space junk and satellites orbiting the Earth now, the moon soon, and Mars eventually, poses a massive, unseen threat to people on the ground, wrote three scientists in a commentary. Risks of Space JunkThe threat to humans isn’t so much about debris falling from the sky (although a major hunk did land in Kenya in January 2025) and hitting someone (the odds of that are possible, but infinitesimal) as ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine