After choking New York City and other major metropolises on the U.S. East Coast a few weeks ago, wildfire smoke from Canadian wildfires is now blanketing the Midwest — and streaming all the way across the Atlantic to Europe. I got a first-hand look at the smoke while flying in and out of Chicago yesterday (June 27), where some of the worst air pollution levels among major world cities were recorded. (As was the case for Minneapolis and Detroit too.) Here’s a photo I took of the pall just aft ...read more
The term schizoid is used colloquially and often facetiously to mean something like “being of two minds about something” or “appearing to have more than one personality.” In psychiatry, however, the term is quite specific, and it definitely does not apply to your sister, who can’t make up her mind about where to go for lunch. The term is short for a condition known as “schizoid personality disorder.” But forget how we use schizoid; in some cases, disorder may not even be the rig ...read more
Gentoo penguins are the speediest swimming birds in the world. Thanks to their slick wings, the birds can reach speeds of up to 22 mph while searching for food. Now, because of a new study published in Physics of Fluids, researchers understand the mechanism behind their exceptional swimming ability and found that it’s all in the angle of their wings.By observing how penguins move and position their flippers underwater, researchers can use the findings to design aquatic vehicles without high ex ...read more
For thousands of years now, mammals have held dominion over the land. But it wasn’t always this way. According to a new paper, early mammals evolved before a massive asteroid hit the planet 66 million years ago and therefore lived briefly in the shadow of the dinosaurs.These hard-scrabble animals included the earliest relatives of humans, dogs, rabbits, cats and any mammal that gives birth with a placenta. They survived until an asteroid marked the end of the Cretaceous Period and the reign of ...read more
In North America, skinks are often tiny, slick and snakelike — with shiny blue tails or bright red heads. Nearly all of them can fit in the palm of your hand. But more than 47,000 years ago, an armored tank of a skink walked the desert lands of Australia.“It was nicknamed ‘megachunk’ or ‘chunksaurus,’” due to the thickness of its bones, says Kailah Thorn, a paleontologist at the Western Australia Museum who recently described the species for the first time. “It’s a pretty heavy ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
