The rings of Saturn are one of the most spectacular sights in the Solar System and one of the most photographed. Despite the interest they garner, astronomers still puzzle over how the rings formed and why they have survived. One clue is that Saturn’s rings sit within the Roche limit, the theoretical distance at which gravitational tidal forces from the parent planet would tear apart any ordinary moon. Indeed, that has turned out to be a common feature of other rings. In 1977, astronomers disc ...read more
On March 29, 2023, the crowds of the NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam vibrated with excitement as the first-ever meatball comprised of woolly mammoth meat — grown in a lab using mammoth DNA from the long-extinct species — sat on display.The mammoth meat was created from myoglobin proteins made by Vow, an Australian biotechnology company. Though not intended for human consumption, the meatball still sparked a dialogue about eating extinct cultured meat.“Cultured meat products [are] expected ...read more
The oldest verified human to walk the Earth was a French woman named Jeanne Louise Clement, who nearly spent time in three centuries over her 122 years from 1875 to 1997, according to the Guinness World Records.Most of us won’t be that lucky, but life expectancy has increased greatly in just a few decades due to modern health practices, sanitation and other factors. But what was the life expectancy of ancient humans?The answer is nearly impossible to answer in most cases due to the lack of det ...read more
This story was originally published in our May/June 2023 issue as "Far & Away." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.On July 19, 2021, 10 days after leaving Cape Town, South Africa, the MFV Edinburgh finally sighted land. The ship had sailed west toward Rio de Janeiro, though it was never headed there. Its destination was Tristan da Cunha, an island smaller than the city of Boston that lies roughly halfway between Africa and South America, in the middle of the South A ...read more
This story was originally published in our May/June 2023 issue as "Making Waves." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.On Feb. 11, 2016, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) unveiled the first direct detection of gravitational waves — produced, in this case, by the merger of two black holes, 1.3 billion light-years away. The announcement (and accompanying scientific paper) came 100 years after Albert Einstein’s 1916 prediction t ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
