How Similar are Siblings? What Makes Us Different?

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

It’s obvious to many of us — whether we’re an only child or not — that siblings are often different from each other. Judy Dunn, emeritus professor of developmental psychology at Kings College London, and Robert Plomin, professor of behavioral genetics at the same institution, were among the first scholars to start empirically questioning why this happens. Drawing from differences they noticed in Dunn’s children, over the past 30 years, they’ve tested siblings’ variations in charact ...read more

23,000-Year-Old Teeth Fill an Ice-Age Gap

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

For many years, the Cave of the Malalmuerzo (“bad lunch”) near Granada, Spain, located near rocky farmland, stood open to the public. Local residents stooped under the low ceiling and wound their way through stalactites, and some made the belly-crawl to the deeper reaches of the cave and the early paintings there. They took home “some artifact […] ceramics, bits of bone, etc.,” writes a local businessman. In 1983, the first archaeologists showed up, but the souvenir-hunting continued ...read more

Does Every Human Have a Detectable Gravity Field?

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Technically, every single object in the universe with mass or energy emits a gravitational field, and scientists have been able to measure the gravitational field of objects far smaller than a human. General Relativity Einstein revolutionized our understanding of gravity with his magnum opus, the general theory of relativity. The theory transformed our perspective of gravity from a simple property of objects relating to their mass, to a view of the cosmos where space and time can bend, flex and ...read more

The Psychological Benefits Of Commuting

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

For most American workers who commute, the trip to and from the office takes nearly one full hour a day – 26 minutes each way on average, with 7.7% of workers spending two hours or more on the road. Many people think of commuting as a chore and a waste of time. However, during the remote work surge resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, several journalists curiously noted that people were – could it be? – missing their commutes. One woman told The Washington Post that even though she ...read more

What Was Traded On the Silk Road?

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Invented in China around 5,500 years ago, silk was the slipperiest, most mysterious material in the ancient world. Fashioned from the twisted threads of the cocoons of the mulberry silkworm, the fabric’s process of production was protected by the state for several thousand years. That said, the secrecy of silk manufacturing didn’t mean that the material remained restricted to China for all of antiquity. In fact, traces of the finished fabric made their way west well before the strategies of ...read more

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