Are we alone in the universe? There are good reasons to suspect that we have company.After all, the universe is exceptionally large, with possibly billions of Earth-like planets in our Milky Way galaxy, which is but one of trillions of galaxies in the universe.The ingredients for life, as far as we know, are common. And humans on Earth have proven life is capable of evolving to a point of technological complexity which could make our presence visible to anyone out there looking.But could we reco ...read more
The release of Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s sprawling study of the man known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” has propelled the world-shifting work of a scientist to cinema’s front stage. Tracking the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer through his time as director of the Manhattan Project and beyond, the film explores the complexities of its protagonist’s character and conscience alongside the thorny union of science and morality.5 Movies About ScientistsIf that tangled, three-hour ...read more
Titanosaurs, a diverse group of long-necked sauropod dinosaurs, were found on every continent, including Antarctica, in their Cretaceous heyday. They lived right up until the end of all other non-bird dinosaurs, when the Chicxulub asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula about 66 million years ago.Paleontologists have discovered dozens of distinct titanosaurs, many of them relatively recently in fossil beds in South America. Nearly all of the group are massive, but like other sauropods, these giant ...read more
Science has long accepted that people are affected by their social environment – a term researchers use to describe day-to-day surroundings, interactions and stresses. For example, people with money, a robust social life and access to safe outdoor spaces are often going to have better long-term health outcomes than those without. Our four-legged friends, whose lives in many ways mirror our own, are also thought to be influenced by their social environment. But the specifics of how and why have ...read more
The divine blend of spices needed to make curry first reached Southeast Asia about 2,000 years ago, when the region began trading with the Indian subcontinent, according to an analysis of ancient spice residue.The new project analyzed 12 different spice grinding tools unearthed at the ancient trading port of Oc Eo, in modern-day Vietnam, by washing them with water and chemicals. This produced hundreds of tiny fragments that the researchers painstakingly identified (to a reasonable degree of cert ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine