In the days before and after a rift opened in the Ethiopian Desert in September 2005, the ground shook with no fewer than 420 earthquakes. Volcanic activity bubbled across the landscape, sending ash into the sky. In the climactic event, the earth ripped itself apart like a pair of too-tight jeans, opening up a 35-mile fissure. Some 25,000 herders fled the first major new “dike intrusion” to hit land since the 1970s, according to one paper.Scientists rushed to the rift, hoping to study a proc ...read more
You probably have it tucked away in your medicine cabinet. Whether you're taking it to stave off the aches and pains of daily life or reduce your risk of a cardiovascular event, aspirin has been a staple for over a century. But what is it, and how does it work in the body? What is Aspirin?Spiraea
(Credit:Diyana Dimitrova/Shutterstock)Aspirin is made from salicylic acid, an organic compound found in a common shrub called Spiraea. The white willow tree's bark also contains the drug's natural elem ...read more
Large language models are a type of artificial intelligence currently taking the world by storm. They include OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and various others. All are trained on vast databases of written articles in which they measure the likelihood of a word appearing, given the sequence of words that appear before it. Armed with that knowledge, the AI produces responses to a given prompt by listing the most likely sequence of words that the model suggests. Computer scientists have furth ...read more
Having a son can be a costly experience for orca mothers, also known as killer whales — and it comes at the expense of having additional offspring, researchers have found. In a recent study, researchers report that male offspring from a population known as the southern residents — which are found off the Pacific coast of the U.S. — depend upon their mothers to such an extent that they reproduce less. (Daughters, however, don't appear to impact reproduction.) These adult sons impose “biol ...read more
On an afternoon in May, 1953, author Aldous Huxley drank a glass of dissolved mescaline, the main psychoactive ingredient in the peyote cactus, and found his home rather transformed. At one point, he looked at a flower arrangement he had appreciated that morning in a clear-headed state for its colors.“But that was no longer the point,” Huxley writes. “I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, mome ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
