As long as there have been little kids and curious scientists, people have been dropping cats to see what happens. And for just as long, cats have landed on their feet. But how do cats pull this off? The answer to that question has been a scientific query for hundreds of years. Do Cats Always Land on Their Feet?In his 2019 book Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics, Greg Gbur, a physics professor at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, gives a delightful tour through the history of th ...read more
It’s hardly surprising that modern languages and their respective words change over time. History and literature have demonstrated this repeatedly.Something that is less clear, however, is the degree to which a given language changes and shapes its human speakers. (It’s an important question, considering there are roughly 7,000 languages currently active on Earth.)To put it more specifically: Might native French speakers, for example, tend to think a particular way because of the language th ...read more
As the world's oceans have spiked a record-setting fever in recent weeks, scientists are trying to work out the precise causes. You can see the dramatic rise in global sea surface temperature in this unsettling graph: Since early March, the global average sea surface temperature has increased to a record high, jumping above those seen during the strong El Niño year of 2016. Also shown in this graph are SSTs from the warm El Niño years of 2002/2003, 2009/2019 and 2015, along with 2022, a relati ...read more
Researchers have dosed microscopic hydra with cannabinoids to observe their feeding habits, and in 2000, a study at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh injected THC into the spinal fluid of rats and set them loose on some chocolate cake batter. The conclusion? The active ingredient in marijuana had effectively given munchies to the THC-injected rats, which ate more greedily.Now a new study has extended the investigation to one of the best-studied organisms on the planet, Caenorhabditis elegans, ...read more
Human evolution is tightly connected to the environment and landscape of Africa, where our ancestors first emerged.According to the traditional scientific narrative, Africa was once a verdant idyll of vast forests stretching from coast to coast. In these lush habitats, around 21 million years ago, the earliest ancestors of apes and humans first evolved traits – including upright posture – that distinguished them from their monkey cousins.But then, the story went, global climates cooled and ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
