It’s humbling to realize that much of high-school math, so vexing to so many of us, was already well understood thousands of years ago. The Egyptians came nowhere near E=mc2, but they knew how to find the volume of a pyramid. The Greeks didn’t conjure up calculus, but they did determine the area of a circle and proved it. Seen in historical context, these calculations are hardly less impressive than those of Einstein or Newton.The modern world, with its digital computers and internal combust ...read more
Muscle dysmorphia is a mental health condition where a person perceives their body as weak and smaller than it actually is. It’s a form of Body Dysmorphic Disorder, and recent research shows that social media could have a major influence on this condition.Prevalence of muscle dysmorphia is not well understood, though it mostly affects men. Studies suggest between 1.7 percent and 2.4 percent of people may meet the criteria. In Canada, experts found that one in four of 2,000 adolescent participa ...read more
Being a giant predator during the Pleistocene — from around 2.6 million years to about 11,000 years ago — was no easy feat. From short-faced bears to Ice Age coyotes, American cheetahs, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, and American lions, competition was a plenty, and staying alive was a daily battle. But yet, this mega-bear was still the apex predator of its time, thriving across North America for millions of years.“Just in the last 13,000 years, we’ve lost most of the big mammals on th ...read more
In April 2022, forestry workers started a small number of fires in the Santa Fe National Forest near a remote mountain called Hermit’s Peak. The plan, part of a nationwide program of controlled burns, was to thin out the dense pine woodlands to reduce the risk of a bigger, uncontrolled burn later.The team was aware of the two ways that wildfires usually spread. The first is via direct contact with nearby trees and grass, which is relatively easy to predict. But the second is much harder. Known ...read more
The observation of living cells is undergoing a revolution as various techniques have increased the resolution of microscopy images to the nanometer scale. Cells are crowded, complex, three-dimensional environments. That makes the full panoply hard to study simultaneously because much of it takes place above or below the microscope’s narrow focal plane. One way of solving this is a technique known as expansion microscopy, in which the cell is filled with a polymer that expands when it is place ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine