The seed for Eben Bayer’s big idea — an idea that would eventually put him on the Forbes “30 Under 30 list” — was planted when he was just a kid growing up on a small farm in South Royalton, Vermont.Every spring, he would shovel wood chips onto the conveyor belt of a 20-foot evaporator that turned sap into maple syrup. But sometimes large, white, damp clumps would turn up in the wood chips and jam up the operation. The clumps were mycelium, the root-like threads of fungi that grow unde ...read more
Prehistoric men hunted; prehistoric women gathered. At least this is the standard narrative written by and about men to the exclusion of women.The idea of “Man the Hunter” runs deep within anthropology, convincing people that hunting made us human, only men did the hunting, and therefore evolutionary forces must only have acted upon men. Such depictions are found not only in media, but in museums and introductory anthropology textbooks, too.A common argument is that a sexual division of la ...read more
NASA’s recently launched asteroid hunter, Psyche, is designed to give us a look at a body that could resemble depths far within the Earth, where we can never go. But one instrument tagging along for a ride is exciting scientists who specialize in a completely different field — that of space communications. Since the dawn of the Space Age, they have depended on radio waves, just a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. But scientists hope to soon expand into another part of the spectrum. Th ...read more
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been sending images of the Red Planet home since 2006. In that time, it sent back spectacular photos of various rovers crawling across the surface, the Mars Phoenix lander parachuting towards the surface and numerous images of curious surface features that planetary geologists are keen to explain.The spacecraft’s main camera, the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), is capable of producing images with a resolution of 30 centimeters per pixel. ...read more
It’s been nearly three decades since Bill Nye the Science Guy first aired on PBS in September of 1993. In the years that followed, Nye, a former mechanical engineer and the show’s titular host, would become America’s most well-loved science teacher, educating millions of children (and plenty of adults) about basic scientific principles like biodiversity and the forces of gravity.In a recent interview with Discover, Nye reflects on more than just the series that made him famous, sharing tho ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine