Inhoudsopgave van November/December 2021 - Discover

Several years ago, Sushma Subramanian was procrastinating on her work when she noticed her desk was a bit wobbly. It was a rather mundane moment, she recalls. But as she began to fiddle with the tabletop, the science journalist found herself noting how the experience felt: the grain of the wood against her fingers, the pinching of her skin and the sensation of her muscles straining to lift the desk. As Subramanian explains in her book, How to Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch (Columbia University Press, 2021), it was a moment when she began to consider how little she knew about this multifaceted sense. The questions kept forming, eventually leading Subramanian to write an article for Discover in 2015 about the development of tactile touch screens. In her…

Amidst a year and a half of Zoom fatigue and interactions that feel like plastic replicas of the real thing, the COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear just how important sociality is to our well-being. So it might seem counterintuitive that for many in the U.S., the return of aspects of a more “normal” life is also bringing something else: a serious dose of social anxiety. Erin Tone, a clinical psychologist at Georgia State University, characterizes social anxiety as a set of varied experiences arising from the possibility of a social threat in the environment. Tone says most of us experience social anxiety in tiny doses — in fact, it’s considered unusual to never experience it at all during your life. And for a subset of people, these anxious responses…

The symptoms that brought Louis to the Keck Hospital of University of Southern California seemed less than concerning at first glance. The 41-year-old said he’d been feeling weak and short of breath for the past three weeks, and his feet were swollen. But vague symptoms can sometimes conceal life-threatening dangers. Soon after arriving, Louis spiraled into respiratory distress, spurring doctors to rush him to the intensive care unit and place him on mechanical ventilation. There, a rapid-fire series of diagnostic tests revealed an escalating crisis: Louis had lymphoma, a cancer that affects the body’s pathogen-fighting lymphatic system. Unnoticed, the cancer had spread, eventually sending him into shock as his organs began to shut down. Soon after, several young doctors heard an alarm for the hospital’s cardiology unit. It was Louis.…

Statistics research doesn’t usually require weapons. But to develop their latest algorithm, Iowa State University statisticians Alicia Carriquiry and Heike Hofmann needed thousands of bullets fired from a small collection of handguns. So they put the firepower in their own hands, and hit the range. criteria that distinguish science from speculation. That so-called sorcery has destroyed lives. The For nearly a year, Carriquiry and Hofmann, supervised by sheriff’s deputies, unloaded round after round into a tube with Kevlar fibers. After each shot, they fished out the bullet and tucked it in a plastic baggie labeled with critical data: gun, barrel, shot number. “If you had asked me a few years ago whether I was going to be doing this type of data collection, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy,’” says…

In all of western Europe, London stands out as the city most vulnerable to climate change, threatened by both floods and droughts, according to the 2018 Lloyd’s City Risk Index report from the Centre for Risk Studies at the University of Cambridge. London is especially vulnerable because it lies in a low-elevation coastal zone and faces the triple-threat risks of tidal flooding from the North Sea, flooding from the Thames River, and surface-water flooding due to heavy rainfall. What could help protect the city and its 9 million inhabitants from these and other climate crises is a little-recognized resource already in place: London’s hidden underground network of rivers. While the Thames is likely the best known, London is, in fact, crisscrossed with rivers, a waterway network spanning about 375 miles.…

OVERPOPULATION EXTRAPOLATION (“How to Save Planet Earth,” May 2021) Let me recommend adding a curve for the human population to your graph of the CO2-loading of the atmosphere. The two will roughly coincide starting about two centuries ago because the growth in the human population is the root cause of all environmental issues, but is never mentioned in articles such as yours. The global population has roughly quadrupled during my lifetime, destroying habitats, increasing the resources consumed, and generating waves of refugees. Without the growth in human numbers, none of these problems would have occurred. Yale Zussman You continue to step away from the major cause of most of today’s problems. Saving the Earth cannot be accomplished by conservation, science, and technology as long as human overpopulation is not addressed.…

Shreya Ramachandran, 18, remembers witnessing California’s water crisis firsthand on a visit to Tulare County in 2014, when she was still a preteen. Tulare spans a large swath of farmland in California’s Central Valley, and at that time, locals were facing dire water shortages amid an ongoing drought made worse by climate change. “I was talking to some of the people in the area whose wells completely ran dry, and they were left without water because they weren’t connected to the central water grid,” she says. “They were trucking water in for even basic needs.” Ramachandran, who lives in Fremont, California, was spurred by the experience to find ways to reuse water from sinks, showers and laundry machines — what’s known as gray water — to help people better cope…

The brutal consequences of climate change in California — the record-breaking heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires — have been well documented. But the climate crisis has also taken a terrible, if more hidden, toll on California’s marine ecosystems. Marine heatwaves in 2014 and 2015 stressed kelp forests, which need colder water to thrive. They also fueled sea-star-wasting disease, which began in 2013 and ultimately resulted in the largest marine extinction event in modern history. Untold billions of sea stars, or starfish, from at least 20 species disappeared from the entire Pacific coast, from Alaska down to Mexico. Enormous sunflower sea stars, now functionally extinct in California, were a major predator for sea urchins; in their absence, the urchin populations exploded. No longer restrained by predation, urchins, a voracious herbivore, moved out…

The teenager probably didn’t see it coming. One moment, they were carrying on with life as usual in South Africa circa 1.8 million years ago. The next, blinding pain, a crunch, and then darkness — dead at the paws of one of prehistory’s greatest carnivores. We know the story because of a single fossil, uncovered and collected by Robert Broom and J.T. Robinson at a fossil-filled cave called Swartkrans. The specimen, SK-54, is nothing more than a skull roof from an early human Paranthropus — an evolutionary cousin who was characterized by deep jaws and broad teeth. What makes the fossil special, and horrific, are two punctures in the skull. The holes line up with the conical lower canines of a leopard. The longer upper canines of the cat’s maw…

SENSING TOUCH • TEEN SCIENTIST • INSIDE AN EARTHWORM HOW DID SOCIAL ANXIETY EVOLVE? • SAVING KELP FORESTS • TIKTOK TREND STAR BURST This Funfetti-like bloom called Cassiopeia A shows the aftermath of a supernova, or a massive star explosion, about 11,000 light-years from Earth. The vibrant colors added to this image denote the elements detected within it; for example, the blue blobs are titanium, iron is orange and oxygen is purple. While astronomers aren’t certain how some giant stars explode, Cassiopeia A is providing some clues. Using nearly two decades worth of data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, scientists discovered bubbles of titanium — the same element used to make your electronics and jewelry — that could have boosted the boom’s shock wave.…

The jewel-like tones in this image reveal the rich interior life of an earthworm — and not just metaphorically speaking. Worms play host to a legion of symbiotic microbes and parasites, which leave behind distinct molecular fingerprints. This past July, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Germany combined two different imaging methods to look at how those molecular signals are distributed throughout a worm’s body. The vibrant colors in the top half of this cross-section represent different metabolites — small molecules that regulate functions such as immune responses — in the worm’s tissue, while the bottom shows the underlying tissue structure. Together, these imaging techniques reveal the interplay between the worm and its parasites on a molecular level, and could shed light on symbiotic interactions inside…

If you think you always look better in the mirror than you do in photos, one of the latest TikTok trends probably won’t make you feel any better. The trend uses the app’s inverted filter to flip your smartphone’s front-facing camera — and by extension, flip that same image you’re used to seeing every morning. For most, the phenomenon has proven a surefire way to kick confidence levels down a notch. But why does it feel like you’re looking back at a less attractive stranger when you see a non-reflected version of yourself? When you’re looking at a mirror, you’re actually looking at a flipped image. The inverted filter presents you with an “unflipped” image of yourself, or the version that everyone else sees. As a result, inverted pictures or videos…

On the University of Glasgow campus, past a 17th-century entry gate, a grungy brick building houses the laboratory of the Regius professor of chemistry. Not much has changed since the first titleholder was appointed by King George III in 1818. Experiments are still conducted in glass flasks — although now by students in T-shirts and jeans. Strolling through the building in a sporty tweed jacket and khakis, the current Regius professor proclaims that everything will soon be different. “In any physics or biology lab, there’s automation,” Lee Cronin tells me. “In chemistry, it’s all still done by hand.” Opening the door to an unoccupied room where chemical reactions are bubbling beneath a janky robotic scaffold, Cronin reveals that the automation of chemistry is already underway, with a goal set on…

KARA YOPAK HAS AMASSED HUNDREDS OF SHARK BRAINS. NOW SHE’S USING THEM TO BETTER UNDERSTAND HOW THE ANIMALS BEHAVE. She’s on the hunt for brains — shark brains, to be exact. To date, she’s collected over 400 brains from shark species all over the world. But it’s not just a hobby; Yopak, a biology professor at University of North Carolina Wilmington who leads the aptly-named ZoMBIE lab, is examining these complex organs to better understand how sharks behave. The idea that sharks are mindless killing machines has been perpetuated for decades. In pop culture, look no further than the horror classic Jaws, where the film’s villain is a vengeful, human-chomping great white. But the misunderstood beasts are more complex than the movies might suggest. For starters, they are some of…