Before area codes were introduced to the public in 1951, there were 10 million possible ways for the seven digits of a phone number to be arranged. This would have become a problem for telephone owners eventually; New York City alone had a population of almost 7.9 million that same year.Yet with the rollout of three additional digits at the front of every phone number, suddenly the total number of possible combinations jumped from 10 million to a whopping 10 billion. Crisis averted, right?Maybe ...read more
Curtis Berlinguette was a preteen when he first heard of cold fusion. The concept involves the generation of nuclear energy at room temperature, rather than heat similar to the searing core of the sun.“My dad read about it in a magazine and said it was going to change the world,” Berlinguette recalls.That seemed like a reasonable conclusion. Cold Fusion EnergyIn the spring of 1989, two electrochemists claimed they’d fused hydrogen atoms into helium under laboratory conditions. If humankind ...read more
A typical wolf pack comprises of a breeding pair and their offspring, including both young and mature wolves that haven’t yet set out on their own. Wolf Pack MeaningA wolf pack is essentially a family, says Doug Smith, a wildlife biologist who headed the program to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone and launched the Yellowstone Wolf Project, an initiative that, over the years, has produced an extensive body of research on wolves.Despite common images of wolves as ruthless and vicious, wolf f ...read more
Aside from their appearance in the historical records of the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, the Nabataeans didn’t keep historical documents of their own. This leaves much of their history and culture open to creative interpretation — including their origins. The NabataeansWhat we do know is that the Nabataeans were a civilization of tent-dwelling nomads who amassed great wealth as merchants. The first accounts of the Nabataeans show that they lived as traders, porters, and nomads in the deser ...read more
Our planet holds a lot of trash. Since the Industrial Revolution, we humans have produced 30 trillion tons of stuff – from skyscrapers and bridges to clothes and plastic bags. Much of it is still with us in the form of waste.Globally, people add 350 million tons to this total every day. What’s worse, much of the world’s garbage is mismanaged – dumped on land, in waterways and in open dumps in cities and towns. This exposes people to serious health risks. It harms plants and soil ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
