Every April, as winter’s grip finally loosens and the nights grow a little warmer, Earth drifts through a centuries-old cloud of cosmic dust. That’s when the Lyrid meteor shower — one of the oldest known and most reliable meteor showers of the year — lights up the night.The Lyrids will peak overnight from April 21, 2025 into April 22, 2025 this year. On the days near that peak, patient skywatchers may be treated to a modest but mesmerizing display of shooting stars streaking across the s ...read more
Back in 1950, Alan Turing proposed an elegantly simple yet profoundly challenging way to determine whether machines could be said to "think." Known as the Turing Test, this measure of machine intelligence sets humans and machines in conversational competition, challenging human judges to distinguish between artificial and genuine intelligence through text-based interactions. Despite numerous attempts, no artificial system had ever convincingly passed this test. Until now.Cameron Jones and Benjam ...read more
It might be time to grant the monkeypox virus a new name. Although the virus (mpox for short) was first detected in lab monkeys in 1958, the original host or reservoir has remained unknown. Identifying the reservoir is crucial, because it gives epidemiologists targets to help control outbreaks. For the monkeypox virus, experts need to shield people from the fire-footed rope squirrel (Funisciurus pyrropus), which lives in the forests of West and Central Africa.Mystery Monkeypox SourceA team of sc ...read more
The first full moon of spring, called the “Pink Moon,” will soon ascend in the night sky. Curious onlookers can expect to catch a glimpse of the full moon's peak at 8:22 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) on April 12, 2025, yet the lack of a rosy hue may leave many people perplexed. The Pink Moon is significant for many reasons, but its color is not one of them; despite the vibrant name, the Pink Moon is not actually pink. Find out the true reason for this full moon’s colorful moniker, as w ...read more
Modern rhinos aren’t Nebraskan animals. And they aren’t North American animals, either. But millions of years ago, rhinos were. In the Middle Miocene, Teleoceras major rhinos lived across Nebraska and across much of North America, too.Analyzing an assembly of T. major remains, which were buried in volcanic ash in northeastern Nebraska around 12 million years ago, a team of researchers recently revealed that these rhinos lived relatively social and sedentary lives. In fact, as reported in a s ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine