Every so often, news headlines warn of an outbreak of kennel cough. Pet parents are cautioned to keep their dogs away from dog parks, kennels, or daycares. In extreme cases, animal shelters close, and rescue transports are halted. In July 2024, for example, a severe kennel cough outbreak hit animal shelters in Delaware. Public health officials issued a temporary, one-month lockdown to stop the spread.The lockdown prevented animal shelters from receiving new animals from out-of-state organizatio ...read more
It’s typical to encounter weeds around one’s backyard plants. But mastodon teeth? Not so much.A couple in Scotchtown, New York spotted what turned out to be the tip of a fossil iceberg. After they found two teeth hiding behind some fronds, they dug a bit deeper and detected two more. Then they decided to reach out for help.“When I found the teeth and examined them in my hands, I knew they were something special and decided to call in the experts,” the resident, who wishes to remain anony ...read more
First, the good news for time travelers. Physicists have long recognized that nothing in the laws of physics specifically forbids time travel. As far as they can tell, these laws don’t care whether time is running forwards or backwards; they work just as well either way.That recognition has spawned numerous studies, some of them surprisingly serious, to test the limits of causality. In this work, physicists have tried everything from bending the fabric of spacetime to exploiting quantum uncert ...read more
If you think of bird flu as a stew, it appears that the latest batch has been simmering on low heat for a few years — at least for humans. Could it boil over into a pandemic?Although there has been a slight uptick in human cases since the avian flu subtype named H5N1 appeared in North America about four years ago, science suggests that a full-fledged human pandemic is unlikely. “There's no human-to-human transmission,” said Demetre Daskalakis, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevent ...read more
After a series of technical hiccups prevented Boeing’s Starliner capsule from bringing NASA astronauts Sunita "Suni" Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore back to Earth in August 2024, it appears that yet another delay will keep the two in space for an extra few months. Suni and Butch, who were launched aboard the first ever crewed mission of the Starliner (the Boeing Crew Flight Test) in June 2024, will now have to wait until late March 2025 or early April 2025 to return home. What Went Wrong w ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine