Marking an engagement or the big wedding day itself with a ring is part and parcel of many cultures today. But you may be surprised to learn that wearing the ring on the fourth finger of the left hand is a tradition dating back at least a thousand years.It’s a practice that’s thought to stem from the belief that a vein ran from this finger all the way to the heart — the vena amoris. This idea is often attributed to the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, but the origins of the ring itse ...read more
Science is constantly improving and teaching us marvelous things about ourselves and the world around us. Our understanding of the sciences bends and molds with the times and is impacted by the humans who study it. And humans are, well, human — which means while we can make incredible discoveries, we're also prone to making mistakes. We carry with us biases that can lead to bad science. Here are five cases where scientists got it completely wrong.1. Humoral Theory(Credit: Book illustration i ...read more
This story appeared in the September/October 2020 issue as part of Discover magazine’s 40th anniversary coverage. We hope you’ll subscribe to Discover and help support our next 40 years of delivering science that matters. The story was updated further in 2023. As dawn broke on April 15, 1912, the ‘Unsinkable Ship’ sank into the Atlantic. Only two days earlier, Titanic set out on its voyage carrying more than 2200 crew members and passengers. The world-class facilities aboard the vess ...read more
The heart is perhaps the body’s most resilient organ and, along with the brain, its most essential. The female heart, which weighs about eight ounces, beats 100,000 times a day (2.5 billion times in a lifetime), pumping blood with roughly the force needed to squeeze a tennis ball. That’s enough blood in an 80-year lifetime to fill 100 Olympic-sized swimming pools.To sustain this breakneck pace, the heart feeds greedily on its own blood supply, consuming about 5 percent of the body’s oxygen ...read more
Typical spacecrafts orbiting the Earth aren’t extremely far away. They’re only a few hundred miles above our heads. So, when it’s time to return to solid ground, it’s a relatively short trip.However, spacecrafts and similar objects in orbit are also moving at exceptionally high speeds. We’re talking 17,000 mph for a low-Earth orbit satellite or spacecraft, and even faster for higher orbits.Combined, these two factors create a dilemma — and a whole lot of heat — when bringing spacec ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
