What Do Your Blood Test Results Mean?

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Your blood serves numerous roles to maintain your health. To carry out these functions, blood contains a multitude of components, including red blood cells that transport oxygen, nutrients and hormones; white blood cells that remove waste products and support the immune system; plasma that regulates temperature; and platelets that help with clotting.Within the blood are also numerous molecules formed as byproducts of normal biochemical functions. When these molecules indicate how your cells ar ...read more

What Is the Difference Between Early Modern Humans and Ancient Humans?

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Some 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens split off from a long line of human-ish primates to become the first fully human species, with abilities and ingenuity unrivaled in Earth’s history. But back then, in terms of behavior and intelligence, those early humans wouldn’t have seemed so different from the other hominins they shared the landscape with — Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo erectus and so on.Now picture one of these ancient people beside a 21st-century counterpart, and consider how wid ...read more

Orbital Resonance: Planets Have a Gravitational Dance With Aligning Orbits

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Planets orbit their parent stars while separated by enormous distances – in our solar system, planets are like grains of sand in a region the size of a football field. The time that planets take to orbit their suns have no specific relationship to each other.But sometimes, their orbits display striking patterns. For example, astronomers studying six planets orbiting a star 100 light years away have just found that they orbit their star with an almost rhythmic beat, in perfect synchrony. Ea ...read more

Experts Warn Against Unregulated Dietary Supplements and Protein Powders

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Dietary supplements are a big business. The industry made almost US$39 billion in revenue in 2022, and with very little regulation and oversight, it stands to keep growing.The marketing of dietary supplements has been quite effective, with 77 percent of Americans reporting feeling that the supplement industry is trustworthy. The idea of taking your health into your own hands is appealing, and supplements are popular with athletes, parents, and people trying to recover more quickly from a col ...read more

An Ancient Stingray Lookalike Inspires Underwater Soft Robotics

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Around 500 million years ago, a strange ancestor of the modern sea star, sea urchin, and sand dollar swam above the Paleozoic seafloor. Classified as a pleurocystitid, the animal resembled an armored stingray in its appearance, armed with what looked like a set of swooping antennae. One of the first of its phylum to move around autonomously, its segmented tail swept from side-to-side to swim forward. Robotics researcher Richard Desatnik and colleagues identified the creature’s method of movem ...read more

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