As concerns over Earth’s limited resources continue to grow, some entrepreneurs are eagerly looking beyond our planet to establish the next big business venture: asteroid mining. The prospect of setting up mining operations in space holds the potential for enticing rewards of rare metals that can’t be easily found on Earth.However, these projects face an uphill climb. Asteroid mining missions may cost upwards of billions of dollars, and the technology they’d need to rely on requires furthe ...read more
Before his discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, it’s rumored that Howard Cater, the renowned Egyptologist, discovered another mummy in 1919. Known as either the Bashiri Mummy, the Mummy of Pacheri, or the “untouchable one,” this mummy was so intricately wrapped that researchers never unfurled it for fear of irreversible damage. The fabric across the mummy's face is woven in an intricate pattern that resembles the base of a pyramid, and it may be the only known mummy to have use ...read more
Tuberculosis (TB) is mostly forgotten, but certainly not gone. We often associate TB with bygone times. In 1882, the consumption, as it was often called then, killed one in seven people in Europe and the U.S. The disease traveled by coughing; crowded cities in both Europe and the U.S. were thought to be one reason behind its rise. In the Victorian Era, wealthy folks travelled to remote, temperate climates to avoid TB, but people with less resources hacked up blood as their lungs deteriorated, un ...read more
It’s a rite of passage that fills men of a certain age with dread: the digital exam for prostate cancer. But suffering prostate cancer is even worse — especially since the treatments come with the chance that the patient will experience either erectile dysfunction (ED) or urinary incontinence.A new surgical approach now reduces the odds of those unwanted side effects, according to a report in The Lancet. A robot-assisted surgical method shows it can spare the periprostatic neurovascular bund ...read more
Back in 1832, the celebrated British physicist, Michael Faraday, carried out a set of experiments designed to answer a tantalizing question: could electricity be generated by Earth's rotation through its own magnetic field? The intriguing possibility arises because Earth’s magnetic field does not rotate with the Earth like a physical object. Instead, it is created at each instant and remains essentially fixed in space. So the thinking at the time was that perhaps Earth’s movement through it ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine