Mars is between 33 and 249 million miles away from Earth, depending on the time of year you make the journey. That comes out to about two years of travel.Once you get there, conditions on the Red Planet are brutal, with temperatures ranging from around -248 degrees Fahrenheit to 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Just getting there is a feat that seems difficult to imagine, yet once astronauts make the trek, they’re in for an intense workload.According to NASA, plans are in the works for travel to Mars as ...read more
From crucial vaccines to new insights about diseases, nearly all biomedical research starts with the study of human cell samples in a lab. All of these samples are originally taken from human patients. But when they make their way to the lab, most of these samples — including the HeLa cell line, one of the world’s most prominent cell samples — are viewed independently from the person they were sampled from. Who Was Henrietta Lacks?These samples don’t exist in a vacuum. Notably, the H ...read more
The concept of sunken treasure has captivated the imagination of pirates, divers, and the general public for likely as long as ships have sunk to the bottom of the sea. Part of the draw is that there are purportedly still a plethora of famous lost shipwrecks out there, such as the undiscovered Portuguese Flor do Mar, a treasure ship that was sunk in 1511 off the coast of Indonesia bearing dozens of chests of gold, precious gems and perfumes that might be worth billions today.But other lost treas ...read more
Snakes seem like relatively simple creatures—basically a glorified sock with holes on either end. Yet, these creatures have managed to adapt to nearly every continent on the planet over the past 100 million years.But how exactly did snakes evolve, and what made these slithery creatures so successful across the planet today? It was likely a combination of three factors that all arose at roughly the same time. “It all happens in one singular evolutionary burst around 100 to 110 million years a ...read more
Three o’clock in the morning — for some people, it’s the most anxiety-producing time. It’s when they wake up after just a few hours of shut-eye and then fail to fall back asleep.For other people, it’s the dreaded hour when they realize they have yet to fall asleep. The clock is ticking toward their wake-up time, and they haven’t even hit a dream cycle.Missing sleep can lead to more than just a sluggish day. Sleep medicine scientists have established that poor sleep is related to poor ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine