People have been asking why space is dark despite being filled with stars for so long that this question has a special name – Olbers’ paradox.Astronomers estimate that there are about 200 billion trillion stars in the observable universe. And many of those stars are as bright or even brighter than our sun. So, why isn’t space filled with dazzling light?I am an astronomer who studies stars and planets – including those outside our solar system – and their motion in space. The study ...read more
Not everyone is a morning person. Some of us work better in the late hours than at the crack of dawn. But most jobs in our society are still geared towards the nine-to-five, forcing those who perform better at night into a schedule that doesn’t always catch them at their best.“If you are an early bird, work is perfect for you because the world revolves around your schedule,” says Sina Kianersi, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. But night owls, or those who tend to stay up late a ...read more
Anyone who has a brain can’t help but be interested in the buzzy class of supplements known as nootropics. Already a $10 billion+ industry, nootropic supplements and treatments offer an almost irresistible promise: to enhance brain function and general cognition, including superior focus, sharper thinking, and better memory.For the millions of people suffering from cognitive decay (and the families who have to watch it happen), nootropics offer a kind of Hail Mary pass, a last-ditch effort to ...read more
Animals are a noisy bunch. They babble and they bleat, and they chirp and croak and coo. And it's no wonder why, since sound is one of the main mediums through which animals can communicate.Studies suggest that there are around 10,000 species of birds and around 6,000 species of mammals that possess the ability to produce sounds, not to mention the sound-makers in the reptilian and amphibian taxa, among others. For these animals, sounds are the trick to survival. They allow their makers to find ...read more
Geoscientists have a good idea of how earthquakes happen. The Earth’s crust — which is on average 22 miles deep — is broken into continental and oceanic plates that rub against one another other due to the movement of molten rock in the Earth’s mantle. Over the decades and centuries, pressure builds at the points where the tectonic plates converge, until the plates crack and the pressure is released, sending shockwaves in all directions. On the moon, however, things aren't quite the same ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine