Ball lightning has fascinated and puzzled people for centuries. This rare and mysterious phenomenon, often described as a glowing sphere of light that appears during thunderstorms, has been the subject of countless anecdotes, scientific investigations, and debates. But is ball lightning even real? And if so, what causes it? Here, we’ll briefly dive into the basics of ball lightning, exploring what it reportedly looks like, how rare it is, what might cause it, and whether it poses any danger.Wh ...read more
Imagine this: You pick up your phone for a video call with a friend. Not only can you see their face and hear their voice, but you can also smell the cookies they just baked. It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, but could it actually happen?I’m a computer scientist who studies how machines sense the world.What Phones Do NowWhen you listen to music or talk to someone on your phone, you can hear the sound through the built-in speakers. These speakers convert digital signals i ...read more
Artists take inspiration from many sources. For the San people of South Africa, the spark that inspired some of their rock paintings may have come from fossils of creatures that went extinct more than 200 million years ago. A study in PLOS ONE says that not only did the San draw on bones of dicynodonts — large animals with downward-turning tusks that roamed the Earth before dinosaurs — but that they beat Western paleontologists to the punch. The “winged serpent” panel depicts a creature ...read more
Everyone who has ever seen Saturn through a telescope is astonished to see the system of rings that surround it. Those rings are rock and ice that span thousands of kilometers around the planet. They are the hallmark of Saturn, but ring systems exist around Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune as well, albeit in less dramatic forms.Yet, you shouldn't need to be a giant planet to have a ring. As long as debris accumulates in the gravitational well of a planet, the rotation will cause it to form a ring a d ...read more
For humans, living in a bubble is a figurative coping mechanism. For water anoles, it is a literal description of an underwater survival strategy. The semi-aquatic lizards found in Costa Rica’s forests sometimes escape attackers by breathing a bubble over their heads that act as a scuba helmet when they dive and swim to safety, according to a report in Biology Letters. Lindsey Swierk an assistant research professor of biological sciences at Binghamton University in New York, and an author of t ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine