Imagine you're a leech in one of the lush rainforests of Southeast Asia (or Madagascar or mainland Africa) that you call home. Perhaps you're clinging to the underbelly of a low-lying plant or burrowed just below the surface in a patch of damp soil. Then, dozens of human tourists start marching through the terrain, providing countless opportunities for you and your companions to suction yourselves onto their boots, or drop down from the trees above. Surely, for the leeches, large groups of human ...read more
Snow leopards are so rare that many of the researchers who have studied them for decades have never even seen one in the flesh. These big cats may leave scat or even the occasional tuft of fur in a hair snare, but their passage is often ghostly — so much, in fact, that photographers are only just now capturing many aspects of their lives. In many areas, snow leopards still face conservation threats due to mining development, livestock herding and persecution from locals in their range.Snow Leo ...read more
In 1346, Tartar leader Khan Janibeg laid siege to a Genoese city in Crimea called Kaffa in hopes of removing the Italians from this central foothold. What happened next has become part-legend, part-historical record: As the Tartars waited outside Kaffa’s walls, the soldiers began to fall one by one to a terrible disease, the plague.Out of frustration, the Tartar leaders catapulted the disease-ridden bodies over the walls of the city, where the residents threw the bodies aside and fled in ships ...read more
Unless you’re Peter Pan, you can’t lose your shadow. At least, not permanently. Shadows crop up wherever light is obstructed by an object, and they come in a range of shapes and sizes. In 2012, for example, physicists captured the first-ever view of an atomic shadow by shining a laser at a single ytterbium atom in a vacuum chamber. And on a much larger scale, our moon blocks the light of the Sun from reaching Earth during solar eclipses. Millions of people will witness this firsthand in 20 ...read more
The United States is a volcanic country. Sure, a large swath of it east of the Rocky Mountains haven’t had an eruptions of tens to hundreds of millions years, but the western US, Alaska and Hawai’i are all full of active or potentially active volcanoes. This got me wondering what are the biggest eruptions the US has experienced and that led me down a rabbit hole considering what that question actually means. So, I present you with the largest eruptions in the US over the last 10,000 years. A ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
