At the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, five eels live in the Amazon Rising habitat, where probes in the water sense their electricity and transmit their energy to a lightbar and a speaker.At any given time, visitors can hear low-voltage pulsing coming from the speakers. If guests push a button, they can summon bubbles or make it rain in the habitat. The eels become more active, and their electricity increases.Scientists have long known that electric eels are indeed electric. But in the wild, they are ...read more
For most animals imprinted with spooky names, their "Boo" is much worse than their bite. Humans generally judge grotesque-looking organisms by appearance, so they conjure up nomenclature that would look right at home on the movie marquee for a "Creature Feature." But even the most menacing-looking animals with shudder-inducing names are more Treat than Trick — as long as they are treated with respect and given the space they need to thrive in their natural environment.1. Goblin Shark(Credit: 3 ...read more
The lost expedition of John Franklin is a classic tale of traveling gone wrong. When the British Royal Navy officer set out from England with two ships in 1845, their goal was to forge a way through the Arctic Ocean to open up the Northwest Passage. Unfortunately, none of the 129 men who sailed out with the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror ever returned. Reports from rescue missions, Inuit in the area and subsequent forensic and archaeological work on human and nonhuman remains have since pieced to ...read more
The Moon is anything but a lifeless rock hanging in our sky. It has pockets of water ice trapped on its surface, caves in which astronauts might one day live, and even an incredibly tenuous atmosphere known as an exosphere.That thin layer of atoms, which begins at the lunar surface and extends 100 kilometers (60 miles) into space, exists mostly because small micrometeoroids strike the surface, vaporizing atoms and lofting some into the void. That’s according to a new study published in Science ...read more
Languages are a lot like living organisms. Both evolve over time, allowing an ancestral tongue like Latin to sire diverse descendants — Spanish, French, Romanian — that are more closely related to each other than to, say, Korean. This much is old news; Charles Darwin himself noted the resemblance. “The formation of different languages and of distinct species,” he writes in The Descent of Man, “are curiously parallel.”Now, new research shows that the analogy runs deeper. Islands, long ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine