The 28 most populous U.S. cities are all settling to one degree or other, according to a study in Nature Cities. The phenomenon isn’t limited to coastal urban areas but includes population centers in the country’s interior as well. Rates differ from city to city — even area to area within some municipalities — but the general phenomenon is consistent.Authors suspect that draining the groundwater upon which the cities sit is a major contributor. If that practice continues — not just in ...read more
Paleontologists have long considered Tyrannosaurus rex a North American reptile, but a study now claims that the king of the dinosaurs’ predecessor hailed from the Far East. The cousin megaraptors likely lumbered from one continent to another via land bridge more than 70 million years ago — perhaps in an attempt to beat the heat, according to an article in the journal Royal Society Open Science. The finding is potentially controversial, because paleontologists have long debated T. rex’s or ...read more
A wolf’s howl is one of those unforgettable sounds of nature. Now, this iconic sound is setting a new chapter for wolf conservation, fitting hand-in-hand with monitoring technology.To make sense of what wolf howls mean for an ecosystem, The Colossal Foundation (the non-profit arm of Colossal Biosciences, which recently made headlines for its dire wolf de-extinction project) has announced a partnership with non-profit Yellowstone Forever and the Yellowstone Wolf Project. The collaboration aims ...read more
It’s your trusty kitchen sponge that you use for everything. Whether it’s to clean the dishes, wipe down the counters, or scrub your pots and pans. But research has shown that sponges might not be your best tool in the kitchen. In fact, they harbor more bacteria than almost any other kitchen tool.According to Markus Egert, a microbiologist at Furtwangen University, in Schwarzwald, Germany, used kitchen sponges are colonized by a large diversity of microbes, including bacteria, fungi, and vir ...read more
Our DNA contains the functional instructions for all of our cells, from the cells in our brains to the cells in our bones and our blood. But it is only by activating and deactivating different segments of our DNA, or our genes, that our cells take on their specialized functions. This is true for all sorts of organisms, whose cells are differentiated when different genes are switched on and off. In simple organisms, these on-off “switches” are typically situated only a short distance away fro ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine