Movies are filled with bullies. In the 1980s, there was that raccoon-hat-wearing terror, Scut Farkus, in A Christmas Story, who made the narrator fear walking home from school. In the early 2000s, Regina George in Mean Girls personified the calculating bully who used verbal abuse and social isolation to harass other students. And Nelson on The Simpsons has bullied others for the last 34 years.Bullying is a common storyline because it’s common in real life. Twenty-two percent of kids ...read more
Around the world today, you’ll find at least 700 different kinds of carnivorous plants, ranging from pitcher plants that lure their victims into pools of digestive enzymes to adhesive-trap plants whose stalks secrete a natural glue, turning them into living flypaper. The fossil record contains evidence of early predator plants dating as far back as 40 million years, although many such plants likely existed much earlier than that. As fascinating as these plants are, none have captured the human ...read more
Fossilized cheek teeth have helped paleontologists learn a lot about what ancient elephants ate millions of years ago. Turns out, those with a less picky diet and more adaptability to changing environments survived. And those who stuck to a grass-based diet went extinct when there were extreme fluctuations in the climate.“This supports the hypothesis of such regions as 'species-factories' where evolutionary adaptation to changing environmental conditions first centered around," said Juha Saari ...read more
Borax was first mined in the Mojave Desert in the late 1880s, when wagon teams of 18 mules and two horses pulled huge loads of it out of Death Valley. A chemical compound, borax contains the element boron. Three-quarters of the world’s boron reserves are in Turkey, while the rest is mined from the town of Boron, California. Since it was discovered, borax has been used for many reasons and has recently been the subject of a popular TikTok challenge. However, the challenge claims that it will im ...read more
Nearly 6,000 years ago, our ancestors climbed arid rocky outcrops in what is now the Nigerian Sahara and carved spectacularly intricate, larger-than-life renditions of giraffes into the exposed sandstone. The remarkably detailed Dabous giraffe rock art petroglyphs are among many ancient petroglyphs featuring giraffes across Africa – a testament to early humans’ fascination with these unique creatures.We are still captivated by giraffes today, but many of these animals are at risk, largely ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine