In June 2024, an Asian elephant in central Thailand gave birth to a set of twins. The event was considered a miracle, since elephant twins are a fleetingly rare occurrence.Jamjuree, a 36-year-old elephant, birthed two calves — a girl and a boy. It’s the first official record of elephant twins of different genders born in Thailand. According to a statement, the shock of birthing a second calf sent the mother into a panicked frenzy. Rare Elephant TwinsElephants have the longest gestation perio ...read more
X-rays pass easily through biological materials to provide unprecedented insight into the internal structure of everything from biological structures in living cells to broken bones in damaged bodies. But biologists face something of a dilemma in making these images. The ionizing nature of X-rays can break chemical bonds, damage living cells and distort the biological structures under investigation. So biological imaging experiments must balance the need for clear images against the inevitable d ...read more
Hearing the name Tiffany in a historical film or reading it in a historical book may distract the audience from the story momentarily since, surely, people were not named Tiffany centuries ago. It's a modern name, right? But the name Tiffany indeed came from the historical name Theophania, which originated in the 12th century.The Tiffany Effect, or the Tiffany Problem, refers to terms that seem modern but, in fact, have much older roots. The name Tiffany inspired the term because most people thi ...read more
For the first time, researchers have spotted a binary star — a system of two stars that orbit each other — near the Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Binary stars have been observed elsewhere in the universe as a common occurrence, but never in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole. The pair of stars, dubbed D9, was revealed from data collected by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Presented in a new Natu ...read more
The oldest known saber-toothed predator, dating back over 270 million years ago, appears to have been an animal caught in the evolutionary middle, according to a report in Nature Communications.The gorgonopsian excavated in Mallorca laid eggs, unlike most mammals. But it was warm-blooded, unlike reptiles. Its leg shape and position were halfway between mammal and reptile. And its saber teeth were more commonly associated with mammals like Smilodon, which emerged in North America about 2.5 millio ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine