For the stressed and overworked, there might be nothing more relaxing than a spa. Beyond the cucumber slices and hot towels, these leisurely destinations carry a fascinating legacy that extends back to ancient times. Bathing in mineral springs — a feature of many historic spas — has been considered a medical and therapeutic treatment throughout the ages, spawning the proverbial phrase “taking the waters”. Today, this practice is known as balneotherapy. Some cities have made the most of ...read more
Dogs have long shown that they can respond to such instruction words as sit, fetch, and come. They have more difficulty differentiating between objects — say a Frisbee or a ball. Earlier research shows that, when asked to choose between two items, dogs pick the correct one about half the time — no better than a coin flip. But a new study shows dogs’ brains respond about as well as a human’s when presented with familiar versus unfamiliar words, according to a study in Current Biology.Mari ...read more
A new instrument aboard NASA’s Europa Clipper may be sensitive enough to detect any life emanating from the plumes of far-off icy moons like Saturn's Enceladus and Jupiter's Europa. Over the years, scientists have found evidence of water underneath both moon’s frozen surfaces.The instrument dubbed the SUrface Dust Analyzer (SUDA) on the Europa Clipper, can detect even the slightest biological signatures in one out of hundreds of thousands of grains of ice from plumes on Europa and Enceladus. ...read more
Airplane flight is one of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century. The invention of the airplane allows people to travel from one side of the planet to the other in less than a day, compared with weeks of travel by boat and train.Understanding precisely why airplanes fly is an ongoing challenge for aerospace engineers, like me, who study and design airplanes, rockets, satellites, helicopters and space capsules.Our job is to make sure that flying through the air or in ...read more
If you don’t live in Australia, you may never have seen a numbat — even if you do, you may still have never seen one. The numbat is small, well-camouflaged, and … there aren’t many to see. That’s because they’re endangered. Though its territory once covered most of the bottom half of Australia, from the west of New South Wales to Western Australia, the numbat is now limited to two indigenous populations in southwest Western Australia (Dryandra National Park and the Upper Warren regi ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine