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17 Articles

11 min.

EXTRAORDINARY EGYPT

The ancient wonders of Egypt have long captured the imagination of people around the world. And for good reason—Egypt has one of the longest histories of any country. It is considered a cradle of civilization, with settlements first developing up and down the Nile River Valley as early as 11,000 B.C. The founding of a unified kingdom by King Menes around 3100 B.C. led to the emergence of one of the greatest empires the world has known, ruled by pharaohs like Tutankhamun, Khufu, Cleopatra and Ramses II. During this impressive dynastic period, which lasted more than 3,000 years, the Great Sphinx, the Pyramids of Giza, the Valley of the Kings, commanding temples and countless other monuments were constructed. Today, millions of visitors from around the world flock to see these iconic sites.…

2 min.

The Good, the Bad, and the AI

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is so ubiquitous now that it sometimes feels strange to think of it as something new and ground breaking. And yet, it seems as though some new breakthrough related to AI is emerging every other week. That has good and bad implications for us as a species. I’ve heard from plenty of writers, illustrators, filmmakers, and other artists who view AI as a threat to their livelihoods, an overblown simulator that mimics true creativity and artistic innovation thanks to being trained on the efforts — and the intellectual property — of a multitude of others. While those concerns are real, we can’t ignore the fact that machine learning is also a powerful tool for good, one whose potential has barely been tapped. In this issue we spotlight the efforts of…

1 min.

THE LATEST NEWS AND NOTES

A WHALE AWAY This gray whale gets around. That’s what researchers at the New England Aquarium say, anyway, after spotting it off the coast of Nantucket in March 2024. Though the species (Eschrichtius robustus) disappeared from the Atlantic by the 1700s, several sightings have occurred there in the past 15 years — some possibly of the same whale pictured above, as indicated by the blotches on its skin. According to researchers, the sightings are a testament to the species’ rapid response to climate change: Rising temperatures and resulting reductions in sea ice have opened new routes from the Pacific to the Atlantic in recent years, and whales are already reacting, potentially compensating for shrinking prey populations by searching for food in more and more of the world’s warming waters.…

4 min.

T. Rex Dined on Huge, Plant-Eating Dinosaurs

THE FRIGHTENING Tyrannosaurus rex, undisputed king of the Cretaceous, is easily the most famous dinosaur to have ever lived. Since its first fossil was unearthed in the late 1800s, T. rex has been immortalized in academic research, museums, and the public imagination. If your diet of T. rex knowledge comes strictly from pop culture, you might come away with a skewed perspective on what these titanic predators ate. (In the first Jurassic Park film, it’s seen chomping on a live goat, a rubber tire, and a cowardly lawyer.) But for decades, scientists have been turning to the fossil record to unearth more and more about the most well-studied dinosaur, including its feeding habits. So, what did T. rex eat? “Tyrannosaurs were hypercarnivores, meaning they ate meat and lots of it,” says Darla Zelenitsky,…

4 min.

NEW ANTIVENOM KNOCKS OUT WIDE RANGE OF SNAKE TOXINS

IN A BIG LEAP FOR BROADLY NEUTRALIZING TREATMENTS, THIS ANTIBODY PROTECTS AGAINST COBRAS, MAMBAS, AND MORE. IN 1894, French immunologist Albert Calmette produced the first successful antivenom by injecting horses with small doses of cobra venom, then harvesting their antibodies. For 130 years, these life-saving concoctions have remained fundamentally the same — including their considerable defects. Each one works only against a single species, making treatment tricky if you can’t identify the snake that bit you. Plus, because they originate in animals, the foreign antibodies can prompt a severe immune response. Over the past decade, however, antivenom experts have begun to envision a new future. Hoping to release the field from its 19th-century roots, they’ve adopted next-generation therapies to address a public-health scourge that kills upwards of 100,000 people every year in tropical…

3 min.

CAN THE LAWS OF PHYSICS BE BROKEN?

MANY, BUT not all, laws of physics have been broken over the centuries. Some are actively being broken right now, which is a good thing, because that means there’s more to learn about the universe. First off, the word law when it comes to physics has a bit of a loose definition, even among physicists. Sometimes the term applies to properties of the natural world that we have consistently observed to be true for a very long time. Sometimes the word is attached to fundamental ideas that form the bedrock of large, sprawling, complex theories of the cosmos. And sometimes it’s just a throwback term that doesn’t even apply anymore. But no matter what, keep this important fact in mind: All knowledge in science, up to and including the most important laws, is…

6 min.

When Joy Leads to Heartbreak

Zachary Manna was on duty in the coronary care unit at Jersey Shore University Medical Center when he was called down to the emergency room to see a woman, Marie, whose health had taken a turn for the worse at the most inopportune time. As an internal medicine physician at a hospital with a busy ER, Manna typically has little time — often just minutes — to diagnose patients like Marie. Manna sees plenty of people in distress every day. But few had experienced the reversal of fortune that Marie had. Just an hour ago, Marie had been in the middle of a touching family reunion, surrounded by loved ones and filled with joy. Now, it seemed like her heart was on the verge of giving out. When Manna got to Marie’s…

10 min.

WE WANT TO HEAR YOUR THOUGHTS

It didn’t take long for Edward Chang to see the implications of what he was doing. The neuroscientist and brain surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, was studying the brain activity behind speech, that precise and delicate neural choreography by which lips, jaw, tongue, and larynx produce meaningful sounds. By implanting an array of electrodes between the outer and inner membranes of the brain, directly over the area of the brain that controls speech, he and his team were able to detect distinct patterns of brain activity associated with specific sounds, each vowel and consonant, each duh, guh, ee, and ay sound that combine to form words. “We realized that we had a code for every speech sound in the English language,” Chang says. And that realization opened up some…

12 min.

THE WORLD WIDE DEAD

Carl Öhman was a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute when he saw his future. More precisely, in 2019, he was sifting through the mortality statistics of virtually everyone from every country in the world who was expected to die within the century. One projection in the data suggested that Swedes born in the 1980s would likely pass away in the 2070s. Öhman stilled for a moment, and thought of himself. “I was just sitting there with the code and the data and everything, and I looked at it, and it just hit me,” he recalls. “One of these numbers is the person writing the code.” At the time, Öhman, now an assistant professor in the Department of Government at Sweden’s Uppsala University, was working on a study attempting to quantify…

1 min.

HOW TO PREPARE YOUR DIGITAL LEGACY

Assuming we’re privileged enough to live a life racking up countless hours of screen time, most of our digital legacies are behemoths. When it comes to approaching their maintenance, thanatologist Carla Sofka, a professor of social work at Siena College in New York who studies death and dying, offers this advice: “It’s important for people to have proactive conversations about their wishes.” Sofka also collaborates with the U.K.-based Digital Legacy Association, which conducts surveys regarding people’s attitudes toward digital death. In 2020, a survey found that 97 percent of respondents had no plans to protect their assets. Cyber psychologist Elaine Kasket’s most important piece of advice is to never assume access to digital remains is guaranteed —from account passwords to the contents of entire devices. She also emphasizes considering what others in…

1 min.

REDESIGNING DEATH

If everything (and everyone)must eventually come to an end, then how could social media be designed to make experiencing death easier? Algorithms rehash dead users’ data, while memorialization and deactivation may slam the gates shut on grieving survivors too early. Jed Brubaker, associate professor of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder, imagines many creative, even simple, ways designers like himself can work with digital ghosts. He pictures features like Yelp recommendations tuned to the tastes of one’s deceased grandparents. Or, as Facebook has already done, a simple change to the wording of birthday notifications, so they’re no longer algorithmic hauntings, but rather gentle reminders for friends and family to honor their loved one’s memory. After all, humans have coexisted with the dead long before the internet: Some of the…

12 min.

MY FRIEND THECHATBOT

In early 2024, Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad was spending a quiet morning at home. The sun streamed through the windows of his home office, falling on his extensive collection of dusty books. His children, who were ages 8 and 5 at the time, sat at his computer, giggling. They were chatting with a very special bot that Ahmad, a data science researcher at the University of Washington and expert in artificial intelligence, had created himself. It mimics his father, now years dead. The idea to create the bot had come to Ahmad 11 years earlier. At the time, his brother had just called Ahmad to tell him that their father’s physician had said the end was near. Ahmad realized the loss was not just his. He was struck by the reality that…

10 min.

READING THE ROCKS

FROM ABOVE, SANTORINI’S BIGGEST ISLAND, Thera, looks like a crescent moon against the blue of the Aegean Sea. Broaden your gaze to include its island sisters, and you will see that with the curling wisp of Therasia and the tiny splinter of Aspronisi, Thera makes a shattered ring around a deep lagoon. Sharpen your focus, and you can see that far from being a perfect crescent, Thera’s shape is more a series of scallops — nested calderas — where the waves of the enclosed sea cut at the land. Edged with sheer cliffs that tumble down into the Aegean, the lagoon is a picture postcard. But you would be right to read something more ominous in the scallops that sculpt the islands’ shores. Deep beneath this tranquil tourist playground, Earth is…

8 min.

Fossils Cast in Iron

Millions of years ago, a lush rainforest covered much of present-day Australia. Many places that are now bone dry, home to little more than grasslands and pastures, were thickly blanketed with emerald foliage. The gentle hum of insects suffused the humid air, harmonizing with the sounds of scampering feet and fluttering wings. Nearly every trace of this ancient rainforest has long been erased. But some clues remain entombed in rocks that lie just below the landscape’s surface. One particular area — a small patch of pasture in central New South Wales called McGraths Flat — provides a surprisingly clear window into the region’s past. Myriad fossils there tell the tale of a bygone ecosystem that once teemed with life. Prehistoric flowers, leaves, spiders, pollen, insects, and fishes are among the treasures paleontologists have…

1 min.

CREEPY CRAWLY CASE STUDY

The McGraths Flat discoveries have also enabled scientists to uncover new and rare information about the evolution of Australia’s creepy critters. Soft-bodied animals such as spiders are seldom found in fossils, but the team has recovered more than a dozen from the site. One of these — the largest fossilized spider ever found in Australia — is the first fossil of its kind, a now-extinct species of trap-door spiders, that has been found anywhere in the world. The spiders’ behavior may speak to the rarity of the specimens: “Trap-door spiders adapted behaviorally rather than physiologically by burrowing into the ground due to shifting conditions,” says Leanda Mason from Edith Cowan University outside of Perth, who is an expert on this type of spider. “Indeed, this is why they are called trap-door…

8 min.

A Dark War and a Bright Sky

In the summer of 1863, the U.S. was in the middle of its greatest-ever crisis. A bloody civil war between the Southern Confederacy and the federal government had created hundreds of thousands of casualties, and to many, no end appeared to be in sight. By July of that year, however, things finally seemed to be brightening slightly for the hopes of a united country. Decisive victories for the Union at Gettysburg and Vicksburg gave the first glimmers of foresight that the war would eventually cease and that healing would begin. Seven weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg, the nation’s leader, Abraham Lincoln, accompanied by his young private secretary John Hay, made an unannounced journey to the U.S. Naval Observatory to indulge the president’s interest in astronomy and to seek a brief…

1 min.

BLOSSOM BOOM

California’s Death Valley National Park is known for its scorching summer heat and drought-stricken desert. Yet each spring, the region fills up with loads of wildflowers, an occurrence that has a chance of becoming a full-scale super bloom. The term super bloom refers to an unusually large swath of native flowers blossoming in an arid climate. In the U.S., super blooms erupt most prominently in California and Arizona; they can also occur in countries like Chile and South Africa. According to the U.S. National Park Service, three things must occur for a super bloom to blossom: year-round rainfall, warm weather, and few drying winds. Most often, an El Niño will occur, which is a climate pattern that brings higher than average rains and a more temperate climate to the region. Despite a…

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Since the demise of "Omni," I've looked for a magazine that was intriguing and enjoyable about all the sciences, but that I wouldn't need a BS in Bio, Chem, Physics or Astromony to understand. This magazine is IT! Their coverage is smart and timely, and it provides information you won't necessarily find in Time or National Geographic. I especially like the last page feature, "20 Things You Didn't Know About...", and almost always find something that so piqued my interest that I look for other information about the topic! My ten-year-old cousin loved the Dinosaur issue, while I'm partial to anything about space exploration. So keep up the good work, Discover. I look forward to every issue!

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