As the summer wraps up, it is also time to wrap up my tour of the Cascade Range volcanoes as seen from space. The modern Cascades extend into Northern California and is the home of likely the largest volcano of the chain ... but the Earth's plates are plotting the end of the Cascades, starting from California.The ocean plates that spawn the magma that forms the Cascade volcanoes are young and small. The Juan de Fuca plate is responsible for the volcanoes from Oregon to British Columbia (save for ...read more
When you look at a crocodile, it’s easy to feel like you’re staring into the distant past. These ancient-looking reptiles, with their scaly skin and fearsome teeth, seem like living fossils — creatures frozen in time, unchanged for millions of years.But despite their prehistoric appearance, animals like crocodiles are not truly evolutionary relics. In fact, they’ve been evolving all along, just not in ways that are immediately obvious.The Illusion of Living FossilsThe concept of living f ...read more
If you’ve been tuning into the recent news, perhaps you’re aware that NASA recently made the difficult decision to delay bringing astronauts from the International Space Station (ISS) home on Boeing’s Starliner capsule. The reason? Safety concerns. The spacecraft encountered several technical issues that teams on the ground simply couldn’t overlook. As a result, astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been instructed to remain in orbit – at least until a pod from SpaceX, a long ...read more
One of the great endeavors of modern science is to understand the brain. This organ, the most complex machine we know, is a miracle of evolutionary biology. It processes a potent firehose of information to set goals, achieve tasks and navigate complex environments, often in ways that put the world’s most powerful supercomputers to shame. Remarkably, it weighs about the same as a bag of flour and runs on little more than a bowl of porridge.And yet, at the heart of this amazing capability is a p ...read more
It’s an old platitude and hoary chestnut: Life is all about balance.But sometimes we can find wisdom in even the most tired cliches. Balance is especially true in terms of managing your body’s intake of its two most abundant minerals: phosphorus and calcium.Although they each have specific functions, they work together to build and maintain strong bones and teeth. And each mineral’s efficacy depends on the amount of the other. Too much phosphorus or not enough calcium in your diet can incr ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine