Many things go wrong when a human spends months alone in a dark cave. Time stills and the body’s rhythms go awry. Sleep withers to a few hours a night, and menstruation may come to a halt. Enthralling stories, like that of Spanish climber and cave-dweller Beatrice Flamini's, shed light on what motivates someone to become a cave dweller.Flamini's Life as a Cave DwellerOn April 14, Flamini emerged from a cave in the country after spending a record 500 days isolated underground, save for a “tec ...read more
With the help of a local fisherman, identified as Jesus Artemio Poot Villa, scientists found the second-deepest blue hole in the world in an unlikely place — the shallow Chetumal Bay located on the southeastern side of the Yucatan Peninsula. Filled with a hostile, oxygen-starved environment, the newly-named Taam Ja’ Blue Hole (TJBH) could one day invite research into how life could survive on alien planets or other harsh environments.What Is a Blue Hole?A blue hole is a vertical cave typical ...read more
Elephants love eating bananas, and feast on them whole whenever they can. But Pang Pha, a 36-year-old Asian elephant who lives at the Berlin Zoo, is a little more precious: she happens to prefer her bananas peeled. While growing up, Pha was under the custody of an attentive caretaker who used to peel her bananas for her. Now, she seems to have taught herself to break the banana against her trunk and wriggle the insides of the fruit from its peel, discarding the latter and savoring just the pulp. ...read more
Mars is a frigid world today, and all of its surface water is frozen solid. However, there’s ample evidence that liquid water once coursed over the Red Planet. That paradox has sparked an ongoing debate: What warmed up Mars’s climate billions of years ago? A team now has proposed that giant asteroid impacts—the kinds that carve out basins exceeding 1,200 kilometers in diameter—might have played an important role. The team reported its results in March in Geophysical Research Letters.Th ...read more
(Credit: NASA/James Blair)
Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen (from left) and NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch greet the crowd at Ellington Field near NASA’s Johnson Space Center on Monday, April 3, 2023.NASA has officially announced the crew for the Artemis 2 mission. During our recent interview with renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, we asked him how excited he was to hear NASA's announcement."It's about damn time," says Dr. Tyson. "There' ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
