What does it mean to be a good thinker? Recent research suggests that acknowledging you can be wrong plays a vital role.I had these studies in mind a few months ago when I was chatting with a history professor about a class she was teaching to first-year students here at Wake Forest University. As part of my job as a psychology professor who researches character – basically, what it means to be a good person – I often talk to my colleagues about how our teaching can develop the character o ...read more
Elephants are the largest land mammals to roam the planet and some of the most socially intelligent creatures scientists have studied. They’re doting parents, they demonstrate empathy towards their elephant friends, they can imitate human speech — and one baby elephant recently took the news by storm for peeling a banana herself. Yet, there are not many of these stunning animals left on Earth.How Many Elephants Are Left In The World?In the 1930s, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature, ...read more
Certainly, lots of people believe in ghosts – a spirit left behind after someone who was alive has died.In a 2021 poll of 1,000 American adults, 41% said they believe in ghosts, and 20% said they had personally experienced them. If they’re right, that’s more than 50 million spirit encounters in the U.S. alone.That includes the owner of a retail shop near my home who believes his place is haunted. When I asked what most convinced him of this, he sent me dozens of eerie security camera vide ...read more
For thousands of years, humans have been getting queasy on boats. People have long felt a rumbling in their stomachs and then braced themselves against the side of the ship in hopes the feeling might pass.Hippocrates wrote about motion sickness more than 2,000 years ago, and the word “nausea” stems from the Greek word naus, meaning “ship.”Scientists now understand what causes motion sickness and how it can be prevented. And studies find it’s something almost everyone will have to e ...read more
After a journey of seven years and nearly 4 billion miles, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft landed gently in the Utah desert on the morning of Sept. 24, 2023, with a precious payload. The spacecraft brought back a sample from the asteroid Bennu.(NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center via AP)
OSIRIS-REx collected a sample from the asteroid Bennu. Roughly half a pound of material collected from the 85 million-ton asteroid (77.6 billion kg) will help scientists learn about the formation of the sola ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine