All sorts of strange animals bounded through medieval minds. There were the blemmyes, beings who wore their faces on the front of their torsos, and the bonnacons, bullish beasts that fought their foes with fireballs of dung. There were sea monks and mermaids and mermen, not to mention the many species of sea serpents. And while barnacle birds fell from trees as if they were fruit, some mythical sheep were thought to be suspiciously strong thanks to the wriggling worms that sat inside their brain ...read more
Earlier this year, on 13 July, an asteroid the size of an office block flew past Earth at about a quarter of the distance to the Moon. In astronomical terms, that’s a hair’s breadth, the closest of close shaves. A direct hit would have produced an explosion equivalent to 1.5 megatons of TNT. By comparison, the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima produced just 20 kilotons. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this incident was that astronomers didn’t spot the body—called 2023 NT1—until 2 d ...read more
If you work in an office, like me, it’s easy to go through most of the day only interacting with other humans. But all it takes is a walk in the park to see that we are just one of the many animals that walk this Earth. Ants crawl out of cracks in the sidewalk, songbirds flit between tree branches and, if you’re unlucky, yellow jackets show up to steal a sip of your iced tea.Some animals, like squirrels and pigeons, have become all-to-familiar. But, others have evolved and thrived in environ ...read more
What does it mean to be a good thinker? Recent research suggests that acknowledging you can be wrong plays a vital role.I had these studies in mind a few months ago when I was chatting with a history professor about a class she was teaching to first-year students here at Wake Forest University. As part of my job as a psychology professor who researches character – basically, what it means to be a good person – I often talk to my colleagues about how our teaching can develop the character o ...read more
Elephants are the largest land mammals to roam the planet and some of the most socially intelligent creatures scientists have studied. They’re doting parents, they demonstrate empathy towards their elephant friends, they can imitate human speech — and one baby elephant recently took the news by storm for peeling a banana herself. Yet, there are not many of these stunning animals left on Earth.How Many Elephants Are Left In The World?In the 1930s, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature, ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine