Acapulco wasn’t prepared when Hurricane Otis struck as a powerful Category 5 storm on Oct. 25, 2023. The short notice as the storm rapidly intensified over the Pacific Ocean wasn’t the only problem – the Mexican resort city’s buildings weren’t designed to handle anything close to Otis’ 165 mph winds.While Acapulco’s oceanfront high-rises were built to withstand the region’s powerful earthquakes, they had a weakness.Since powerful hurricanes are rare in Acapulco, Mexico’s b ...read more
Have you ever wondered whether the virus that gave you a nasty cold can catch one itself? It may comfort you to know that, yes, viruses can actually get sick. Even better, as karmic justice would have it, the culprits turn out to be other viruses.Viruses can get sick in the sense that their normal function is impaired. When a virus enters a cell, it can either go dormant or start replicating right away. When replicating, the virus essentially commandeers the molecular factory of the cell to mak ...read more
The first primates arrived in the Americas about 56 million years ago and prospered for a time, but it wasn’t to be.They died out some 34 million years ago, after the Eocene-Oligocene extinction event, during which the planet became cooler and drier. Half of all mammal genera died around the globe.But somehow, this set the stage for a lemur-like animal known as Ekgmowechashala to establish itself in the Great Plains of the present-day U.S.Scientists have disputed how to classify the odd-looki ...read more
Colorful bodies painted in vibrant reds or blacks, heads dressed in wigs of human hair, and masks with eyes and mouths wide open, as if still breathing – these were the mummies made by the Chinchorro people.They were among the earliest ancient humans to settle on what’s now the coast of northern Chile and southern Peru. And the mummies are the oldest in the world, predating even the first mummified pharaohs of Ancient Egypt by a couple millennia. But after thousands of years, Chinchorro mumm ...read more
This story was originally published in our Nov/Dec 2023 issue as "Answers in the Ashes" Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.Tom Kluge was at home getting ready for work when he got the call from an emergency command center dispatch. It was Nov. 8, 2018, and a wildland fire had been spotted northeast of Pulga, a remote community tucked away in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains about 35 miles from where Kluge was stationed.At the time a fire captain specialist and 16-y ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine