Until the middle of the 19th century, surgery was performed with no anesthesia. You don’t need a fertile imagination to realize how excruciating the experience was for patients. Nor did the surgeons who administered this particular type of torment take it lightly. In The Worst of Evils: The Fight Against Pain, Thomas Dormandy tells how the 19th-century surgeon and medical pioneer Sir James Paget recalled those gruesome days before anesthesia in his memoirs: “They had been the worst night ...read more
Most living things on Earth have an internal clock that ticks at the schedule of a circadian rhythm. Environmental factors can throw off this rhythm, and for animals that live in zoos, these factors are different compared to animals living in the wild. One of these factors is moving an animal to a different time zone for conservation purposes. To understand if animals could get jet lag, a recent study tuned into the clocks of wild and captive pandas in zoos worldwide. Researchers found that p ...read more
When pterosaurs thrived, the world would have looked like a very different place. The climate was warmer, almost subtropical. And the Solnhofen archipelago in modern-day Bavaria, Germany, was home to various flying reptiles.In the late Jurassic period, 145 million years ago, they would have lived alongside a feathered dinosaur named Alcomonavis as well as a small predator called Compsognathus. But for the most part, the archipelago was home to a plethora of these ancient flying beasts. One sp ...read more
The age-old fascination with giants has persisted throughout human history and transcended throughout our culture. Tales of these colossal figures have sparked our imagination and curiosity for generations. Some may dismiss these stories as mere legends or fantasies, while others question whether there is evidence leading to the possibility that giants, in some form, may have once roamed our world.Are Giants Real?Do giants have any basis in reality? Humanlike beings who grow to 20 feet or more a ...read more
Microplastics are everywhere. Everyday items like clothing, food packaging, cosmetics and car tires shed tiny particles of plastics, which in turn find their way into blood, baby poop, placentas and breastmilk. According to recent research, plastics are even in the intricate, delicate tissue that makes up our lungs.We breathe in about 16 bits of microplastic every hour, the equivalent of a credit card each week, according to a recent study published in the journal Physics of Fluids. ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine