Discover May/June 2022

In this issue, we take you to several different places around the world with a set of feature stories that share more than a few common threads. In “Living With Fire” (page 34), we see how Australia, certainly no stranger to fire, is still reeling from its devastating Black Summer, during which more than 15,000 wildfires ravaged the country. We also take a look at the work of researchers that could offer invaluable insight and strategies for other countries that experience increasingly catastrophic fire seasons around the world — including the U.S. Meanwhile, “Climate Chained” (page 44) takes us to the island nation of Tuvalu in the west-central Pacific, which faces a grave existential threat: Ever-rising waters threaten literally to drown Tuvalu out of existence. Far from submitting to that fate, its…

THE MEANING OF LIFE (“Can Life Exist on a Rogue Planet?”, Sept/Oct 2021) The Sept/Oct issue includes an article on life on rogue planets which features a complex formula for estimating the number of civilizations in the Milky Way that host life. However, I have yet to see a definition of life; instead, the phrase “as we know it” is often used (or implied). That may suffice for the next few hundred years, but not in the future, if we wish to explore or colonize. If we hope to visit other planets, that definition, in my opinion, should be broadened. We cannot restrict life only to organisms that use gases such as oxygen, nitrogen, etc., and water. What if we found a planet whose organisms needed an acid as a basic fluid…

WHO’S YOUR MUMMY? This ancient Egyptian mummy — long thought by researchers at Poland’s National Museum in Warsaw to be a male priest — kept its identity under wraps for nearly two centuries. Only after a recent round of X-rays and CT scans did scientists discover that the specimen is the world’s first-known pregnant mummy. The high-status woman died between the ages of 20 and 30 and was likely embalmed in Thebes during the first century B.C., according to a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science last spring. Why the fetus, estimated to be 26 to 30 weeks old, was not extracted and mummified separately remains a mystery. It could, however, shed light on who the ancient Egyptians believed capable of traveling to the afterlife.…

Practitioners of alchemy, the medieval predecessor of chemistry, once had a saying: “It is harder to destroy gold than to make it.” Gold — pure gold — is remarkably resilient against fire, acid and rust. In fact, short of launching it into the sun or tossing it into a volcano, leaving the element in a nuclear reactor for a while is your only chance of near-total destruction. Small wonder, then, that gold has so captured the human imagination. For centuries, alchemists from China, India and Europe were obsessed with the transformation of base metals (particularly lead) into gold. They sought a mythical substance, called the “philosopher’s stone,” to accomplish this task, with no success. Their techniques have long since been relegated to the realm of pseudoscience, alongside many of their other…

In 2014, Greg Fiske, a geographer at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, was in Siberia during an unusually hot period when a strange news story came out: Pilots had flown over the Yamal Peninsula and reported a huge hole in the ground that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, in the same region that Fiske and his colleague, Sue Natali, were working. “Siberia is a big place, but we were not far away,” he says. “It was kind of odd to experience that.” Since then, researchers have identified more of these craters across two regions, the Yamal and Gyda peninsulas. They’re part of the Siberian tundra, a massive stretch of land in Russia characterized by a layer of permanently frozen soil just below the surface. And, as scientists have found,…

From centuries-old maritime lore to more recent depictions in literature and film, the giant squid looms in our imaginations as a monster of epic proportions. These squids can be more than 40 feet long, with eyes the size of pie dishes and sharp, birdlike beaks that shred their prey. Even into the 21st century, few people had seen one alive. But in 2019, Nathan Robinson, an independent researcher based in Valencia, Spain, spotted the fabled animal. Robinson was reviewing footage from a camera in the Gulf of Mexico, designed for sneakily observing deep-sea cephalopods like octopuses and squids. “Based on size alone,” he says, “what we were seeing could only really be one thing.” The footage, which revealed surprising information about the squid’s behavior, is the latest to surface from a covert…