Languages are a lot like living organisms. Both evolve over time, allowing an ancestral tongue like Latin to sire diverse descendants — Spanish, French, Romanian — that are more closely related to each other than to, say, Korean. This much is old news; Charles Darwin himself noted the resemblance. “The formation of different languages and of distinct species,” he writes in The Descent of Man, “are curiously parallel.”Now, new research shows that the analogy runs deeper. Islands, long ...read more
The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-bomb Sufferers Organizations. Many of these witnesses have spent their lives warning of the dangers of nuclear war – but initially, much of the world didn’t want to hear it.“The fates of those who survived the infernos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were long concealed and neglected,” the Nobel committee noted in its announcement. Local groups of nuclear survivors created Nihon Hidankyo in 1956 ...read more
Rock art found in South Africa, and painted two centuries ago, represents how the San people imagined extinct animals that they found in fossil form.This early rendering of these fossils could relate to the lost cultural belief of rain ceremonies and the realm of the dead.“It’s a combination of what they could see in reality and what they imagined,” says Julien Benoit, a paleontologist at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa as he relates in a study published recently in PLOS ON ...read more
What came first, farming or our ability to digest its carbohydrate-rich harvest?A study of a gene key to breaking down carbohydrates started duplicating itself in humans over 800,000 years ago— well before the dawn of agriculture. A team of researchers report in Science that the gene, called AMY1, started creating variations of itself long before humans split from neanderthal. It plays an essential role in producing starch-digesting saliva.Ancient Dietary NeedsIn general, when genes make “co ...read more
On Oct. 14, 2024, NASA launched a robotic spacecraft named Europa Clipperto Jupiter’s moons. Clipper will reach the ice-covered Jovian moon Europa in 2030 and spend several years collecting and sending valuable data on the moon’s potential habitability back to Earth.Clipper isn’t the only mission highlighting researchers’ interest in Jupiter and its moons.On April 13, 2023, the European Space Agency launched a rocket carrying a spacecraft destined for Jupiter. The Jupiter Icy Moons Explo ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine