In the early morning hours of Sept. 19, 1910, Mary Hiller awoke inside the Chicago home she shared with her husband and four children. The gas light at the head of their stairway, which she always left running overnight, was out — so she sent her husband to investigate.Upon inspection, Clarence Hiller found an intruder: a recently paroled man named Thomas Jennings. The two struggled briefly before several gunshots rang out, leaving Hiller dead. Prior to this fatal encounter, Jennings had sexua ...read more
I frequently toss and turn at night. If a breeze whispers through the curtains, I’m up; if a car backfires, I’m wide awake. And, apparently, I’m not alone.According to a 2022 survey conducted by Gallup and the mattress retailer Casper, a third of U.S. adults reported their sleep the previous night as either fair or poor — versus good, very good or excellent. This suggests that around 85 million of us, based on 2020 Census data, aren’t getting enough shuteye.Across the internet, noise a ...read more
Everything in the fire station parking lot was bathed in a red glow. Although this is Hawaii, the air felt especially steamy and warm. Nearby, lava fountains up to 150 feet (60 meters) tall were blasting from fissures. The scene was vaguely apocalyptic, beautiful but terrifying. Kīlauea had started to erupt from the lower East Rift Zone for the first time in over 50 years, right in the middle of the Leilani Estates subdivision, pouring lava into people’s backyards. For U.S. Geological Survey ...read more
In the late 1950s, dentist and US Navy Capt. Kirk C. Hoerman, then a young man in his 30s, attempted to answer a bold question: Might the saliva of prostate cancer patients have different characteristics from that of healthy people? Could it contain traces of a disease that’s so far away from the mouth?Without wasting more of their own saliva on elaborate discussion, Hoerman and his colleagues from the department of dental research at the Naval Training Center in Great Lakes, Illinois, got d ...read more
The average person in the U.S. uses an enormous amount of plastic — much more so than in other countries. And this number has surged in recent decades.Back in 1980, annual plastic use in the U.S. was around 60 pounds per person. By 2018, this figure had risen to 218 pounds. A paper from 2020 estimated that 46 million tons of plastic waste was created in the U.S. in 2016.“We estimated that in the U.S., our population produces more plastic waste than in any other country on the planet. That's ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
