This story appeared in the September/October 2020 issue as part of Discover magazine’s 40th anniversary coverage. We hope you’ll subscribe to Discover and help support our next 40 years of delivering science that matters. The story was updated further in 2023. As dawn broke on April 15, 1912, the ‘Unsinkable Ship’ sank into the Atlantic. Only two days earlier, Titanic set out on its voyage carrying more than 2200 crew members and passengers. The world-class facilities aboard the vess ...read more
The heart is perhaps the body’s most resilient organ and, along with the brain, its most essential. The female heart, which weighs about eight ounces, beats 100,000 times a day (2.5 billion times in a lifetime), pumping blood with roughly the force needed to squeeze a tennis ball. That’s enough blood in an 80-year lifetime to fill 100 Olympic-sized swimming pools.To sustain this breakneck pace, the heart feeds greedily on its own blood supply, consuming about 5 percent of the body’s oxygen ...read more
Typical spacecrafts orbiting the Earth aren’t extremely far away. They’re only a few hundred miles above our heads. So, when it’s time to return to solid ground, it’s a relatively short trip.However, spacecrafts and similar objects in orbit are also moving at exceptionally high speeds. We’re talking 17,000 mph for a low-Earth orbit satellite or spacecraft, and even faster for higher orbits.Combined, these two factors create a dilemma — and a whole lot of heat — when bringing spacec ...read more
Drug overdose deaths have skyrocketed in the U.S. in recent years. In 2021, 106,699 people died of overdoses. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that number was up 14 percent from the year before. Experts contend that it’s not that more people are using drugs; it’s that the drug supply has been contaminated with highly potent fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is 50 times stronger than heroin. Overdose deaths that included fentanyl increased by 22 percent last year ...read more
[embedded content]Debate continues as to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, propelled in part by U.S. Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which conducted their own investigations. Both issued tentative conclusions that the disease originated in a scientific facility, fueling the lab leak theory. But scientists point to a likely animal source, ranging from horseshoe bats to raccoon dogs to even outer space.We’ve been here before with new diseases, according to epide ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
