A female American crocodile has spent her entire life in captivity in a reptile park in Costa Rica and just laid several fertile eggs — without mating first.This recent event means that researchers are now adding crocodilians to a growing list of birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that can generate offspring without the help of a male mate.“It’s likely that this has happened for thousands and thousands of years and [has] just been missed,” says Warren Booth, an evolutionary biologist a ...read more
The Earth hasn’t always had ozone — or even oxygen — in its atmosphere. Our planet spent more than 2.4 billion years with an oxygen concentration of less than 1 part per million, in fact. While the element is plentiful throughout the universe, what little Earth was born with quickly evaporated away into space.It wasn’t until the arrival of plants and photosynthesis, which consumes abundant carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and leaves oxygen as a byproduct, that the concentration of ox ...read more
“Doubt has killed more dreams than failure ever will,” is a popular Suzy Kassem quote, especially for those who are too afraid of failing at something that they don’t even bother to try. Think of all the songs and books that were never written or the athletes and artists that never made it because they were too afraid of failing. Or, imagine the pressure professional athletes or musicians feel to perform well enough that the audience isn’t disappointed in them. This doubt or fear is wh ...read more
You probably know them, even if you don’t love them. They pop up on social media and in text messages — how else would you share your Wordle score without giving away the solution? — and have even infiltrated advertisements and work emails. In 2015, the Oxford Dictionary chose one as its “word” of the year.We’re talking, of course, about emojis. The colorful pictographs are superb substitutes for those things that are sometimes lost in text-based communication: emotions, body langu ...read more
A new paper proposes that the universe's first stars were about as different from twinkling, sunlike stars as you can get. These "dark stars," it argues, were fueled by huge globs of annihilating dark matter and seeded the galaxies we see today.Strange as they are, such stellar bodies explain one of the newer mysteries in astronomy.In December 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope identified three ancient galaxies as part of its JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES). These distant, deep ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
