5 Dog Breeds That Eventually Went Extinct

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Humans first domesticated dogs some 14,000 years to 29,000 years ago, though this is still up for debate. While it’s settled science that they evolved from grey wolves — the debate over where and how is still far from settled.Research has called into question the belief that all dogs evolved from the same Eurasian grey wolf population, suggesting there could have been both a western and eastern Eurasian wolf population from which dogs descended. What is known is that dogs and humans hav ...read more

The Cryosphere Is Crying out to Us. We Should Pay Attention.

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

For quite some time, climate scientists faced a conundrum: Even as the planet warmed, Antarctica's vast expanses of floating sea ice weren't shrinking. In fact, at times the ice was expanding, confounding common-sense and the predictions of sophisticated climate models.Meanwhile, sea ice in the Arctic far to the north was shriveling dramatically, more or less as models predicted, and just as you'd expect in a warming world. This stark discrepancy led climate change skeptics, and some media ...read more

What Is the Truth Behind the Controversial Phantom Time Hypothesis?

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Contrary to what you might believe, you aren't actually living in the 21st Century. Instead, you're in the 1700s, and the reason that most of you don't recognize this fact is that the elites of the early medieval period worked hard to deceive you. At least, that's what German historian Herbert Illig puts forward in his phantom time hypothesis. "There's this outrageous claim that all historians have made a mistake and that we've all had the wool pulled over our eyes and that the chronology we a ...read more

Early Humans Were Likely Animal Scavengers and Ate Saber-Tooth Cat Leftovers

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

When early humans first arrived in modern-day Spain, about a million and a half years ago, they immediately faced a quandary: what to eat?Scientists have long suspected that they borrowed from the still-fresh kills of saber-tooth cats, which would have only eaten a portion of their meal. In doing so, Homo erectus, or perhaps another early hominin, would have faced competition from the bone-crushing giant hyena, a long-extinct scavenger that would have weighed more than 200 pounds.But have no fea ...read more

Why Are Certain People Allergic to Bee Stings?

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Jamie Ellis has experienced thousands of bee stings in his lifetime. Ellis, a professor in the entomology and nematology department at the University of Florida, admits to experiencing between 400 and 450 stings in a single day while conducting research. Even after experiencing many stings, he says they are still painful. “You never really get immune to the pain,” Ellis says.Bees work hard to defend their hive, and causing pain to an organism they want to drive away as quickly as possible is ...read more

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