Coming to terms with death isn’t easy — even if you’re an insect that’s little more than an eighth of an inch in size. For fruit flies, or Drosophila melanogaster, the mere sight of their companion’s corpses can trigger certain cues known to alter their brain chemistry, deplete fat stores and even cause other flies to avoid them, as if the traumatized insects still carried the stench of death. What’s more, scientists from the University of Michigan have found that fruit flies who wit ...read more
One of the great puzzles of modern astronomy is whether the Solar System hides a distant undiscovered planet. If this planet were relatively near — orbiting close to or within the orbit of Neptune — it ought to have been discovered by now. But if it were much more distant — orbiting in the Kuiper Belt far beyond the orbit of Neptune, for example — astronomers would find it extremely hard to track down. There is indeed evidence to support the existence of such a planet. This comes from th ...read more
Skin is an awesome and weird organ. As the body’s biggest organ, it does a lot to look after you, protecting you from the outside world of sunlight, harsh chemicals, nasty germs and severe cold. And it does all this while keeping water inside your body and enabling the sense of touch.I’m a biomedical engineer. My research team and I try to better understand the mechanics and function of soft biological tissues.We know skin wrinkles as you get older or when you pinch it between two fingers. ...read more
This article was originally published September 8, 2020. It has been updated with current information. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), the Atlantic hurricane season spans from June 1 to November 30, with storms usually ramping up in late summer. NOAA, in the last few years, has issued above-normal hurricane predictions, and climate change is likely the reason. There are all kinds of ways to measure how bad a hurricane is or the kind of damage it might inflic ...read more
A University of South Florida geoscientist says the key to finding missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 could rest with analyzing barnacles. Attached to its debris, some barnacles have already been recovered from locations around the Indian Ocean.His work so far with barnacles recovered from a flaperon (a type of aileron) has produced a partial map showing how the debris likely moved across the ocean. A future map leading to the crash site could help to renew the official search effort, which en ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine