Of all the weird, tiny organisms out there, tardigrades might just be the cutest.“Under a microscope, what you would see is this little critter that kind of looks like either an eight-legged Gummi bear, or an eight-legged manatee,” says Thomas Boothby, a molecular biologist at the University of Wyoming.To top it off, these lovable micro-animals are known colloquially as water bears or moss piglets.What Is a Tardigrade?(Credit: Shutterstock/Oleh Liubimtsev)Biologically speaking, tardigrades a ...read more
The age of dinosaurs was a trying time for survival. Vicious carnivores lived amongst enormous herbivores. The climate was often unforgiving. During the Triassic period, for example, the planet was hot, dry and covered in desert. And there were no polar ice caps to escape the burn. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions were a plenty, eventually breaking up the global continental block of Pangea. All the while, theropods tried their best to hold on to their status at the top of the food chain. Th ...read more
In a not-so-distant future, when a burbling stream cascading down the Rocky Mountains appears in your dreams, you might be skeptical of who planted it there. While the notion of a corporation seeding dreams in the sleeping mind sounds like a science fiction plot, some consumers began taking the idea seriously in 2021.That’s when Molson Coors ran an online video touting its “targeted dream incubation” campaign. The premise of the project was to plant images of Coors beer into the dreams of ...read more
New York City (NYC) residents are masking up again, but not to protect against a virus. East Coast residents awoke Tuesday morning (June 6) to their cities and towns shrouded in a thick, smokey haze from the current wildfires in Quebec, Canada. The smoke is so thick that NYC moved up to number one on the World Air Quality Index (AQI), according to IQAir, with a rating of over 200 — which is considered “very unhealthy.” The rating has since dropped to 161 – “unhealthy” — and the c ...read more
The word “engineer” is somewhat of a modern marvel. It was used in the military during the American Revolution to describe officers and soldiers assigned to build fortifications. Civilians began using it in the 1800s, and the first professional engineering association was founded in the U.S. in the 1840s.The ancient world didn’t have the term engineer to describe the scholars and scientists whose discoveries contributed to the advancement of engineering. But ancient engineers helped to c ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
