Inhoudsopgave van May/June 2023 - Discover

THE USE OF voice-over work is ubiquitous across modern media, from video games to TV and movies. But increasingly, the voices you hear on your sound system aren’t totally humanmade; they may be the result of artificial intelligence. Respeecher, a voice-cloning company founded in 2018 and based in Ukraine, is currently working with LucasFilm to provide voice services for various Star Wars projects. The company’s speech-to-speech tech is responsible for synthesizing the voice of a younger Luke Skywalker in both The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, as well as restoring James Earl Jones’ iconic Darth Vader voice to its original quality in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series. The company also digitally recreated the voice of the late NFL coach Vince Lombardi for a 2021 Super Bowl commercial and helped…

FROM HOSPITAL staff and emergency responders to service-industry employees, shift workers make up about one-fifth of the U.S. workforce. While some might argue that some work outside the bounds of 9:00 to 5:00 is a necessity in modern society, these night-shift and swing-shift schedules aren’t just a benign inconvenience — research shows that shift work is associated with a host of health concerns. Reducing those risks could benefit millions of working adults. THESE HEALTH consequences can manifest in a variety of ways. “Working irregular or night shifts generally translates into also having irregular sleep patterns and getting light exposure at night, which can suppress the body’s natural production of melatonin,” says Sabra Abbott, sleep medicine specialist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Melatonin is crucial in sleep regulation; its suppression meddles with…

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE HISTORY OF OUR SOLAR SYSTEM, HUMANS ARE COLLECTING ROCKS from another planet. Since the Perseverance rover landed on Mars in early 2021, NASA scientists have been guiding it across the Jezero Crater, an ancient martian lakebed. When the rover reaches a site of geological interest, it drills out a small rock sample and seals it in a tube. These bits of the martian surface (around 2.5 inches long and roughly as thick as your pinkie) are expected to arrive on our planet in 2033. It’s the latest in a series of technologically breathtaking missions that have opened Mars to us since 1965, when the Mariner 4 spacecraft sent back the first bleak photographs of the planet’s surface. So far, our efforts on Mars haven’t…

On July 19, 2021, 10 days after leaving Cape Town, South Africa, the MFV Edinburgh finally sighted land. The ship had sailed west toward Rio de Janeiro, though it was never headed there. Its destination was Tristan da Cunha, an island smaller than the city of Boston that lies roughly halfway between Africa and South America, in the middle of the South Atlantic. Tristan is an unlikely place for human life: The island is 1,750 miles from the nearest continent, and the environment is harsh. A large active volcano dominates the landscape. Only a few hundred people live in “The Settlement” — a tiny, 200-year-old community officially named Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, though nobody on the island ever calls it that — which is squeezed onto a small plain…

When it comes to ancient foods, archaeologists can easily glean main ingredients based on butchered bones and plant remains found in cooking areas. But every chef — and diner — knows dietary staples don’t make meals delectable or distinctive. It’s flavor, rendered through spices, herbs and culinary craft, that defines a dish. Certain flavors have come to distinguish the cuisines of different cultures, like umami in Japan or herbes de Provence in southern France. In the 1970s, cookbook author Elizabeth Rozin named this phenomenon the Flavor Principle. “Chefs talk about this all the time, but archaeologists do not,” says Christine Hastorf, an archaeologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who urges her colleagues to think more about flavor. Communities “inherit not just dishes and not just meals, but…

Our Next-Gen Transit series of articles in the Nov/Dec 2022 issue generated plenty of emails from our readers. They questioned the potential dangers, infrastructure challenges and unexpected environmental effects caused by autonomous vehicles. Here’s a small sampling of our readers’ thoughtful responses — and a few notes from the stories’ authors to help answer some of those questions. » In your interesting Next-Gen Transit series, you didn’t mention a major barrier to electric vehicle adoption: lack of time to charge one’s vehicle if you are one of the millions of apartment dwellers who lack charging accommodation. Charging away from home is time-consuming and inconvenient. This may lead to a two-tier future: electric cars for those who can charge at home and gasoline vehicles for those who can’t. And if some…

NEXT TIME you’re with a loved one, try an awkward experiment: Take a moment of silence and gaze into each other’s eyes. By the time you reach about four seconds, things will probably start to feel uncomfortable. Yet the precise reason why is tricky to pin down with a scientific lens. “There’s something in that looking that has meaning, sustainable meaning,” says Joy Hirsch, a neuroscientist at Yale School of Medicine and founder of the school’s Brain Function Laboratory. “The mechanism for connection has never really been understood.” In fact, many questions remain unanswered about how eye contact might influence social interactions. Hirsch and other neuroscientists have only recently begun to acquire meaningful data mapping the interplay. Such work has promising potential in the realms of autism — which can…

Clammy, cool and sickeningly moist, the feel of Paul’s back almost made my hand jerk away. I needed to hear his breath sounds, though, so I kept the stethoscope there. His oxygen saturation of 89 percent worried me, but he was fit-looking and in no distress, and easily took three clear-sounding breaths. For physicians, a cold sweat usually means diaphoresis, excessive sweating with no apparent cause. I recalled another well-appearing patient who thought he’d just cracked some ribs; his cold sweat heralded a ruptured spleen. “Diaphoresis means your patient is sicker than they look,” I’ve harangued hundreds of medical students over the years. “It is always bad.” For Paul, the clear breath sounds made pneumonia unlikely; heart attack and pulmonary embolus were next. “When did you notice the shortness of…

If something doesn’t tick all those boxes, it’s not considered a living organism. However, the world is teeming with minuscule things that aren’t quite alive, but don’t seem to be fully inert either. This microscopic menagerie can make scientists pause — and disagree — over how we even define life in the first place. Viruses, for instance, are clearly capable of evolving: The COVID-19 pandemic’s variant-led waves demonstrate the ever-changing mutability of SARS-CoV-2. But Nobel-winning immunologist Peter Medawar and author Jean Medawar wrote in 1977 that a virus is “simply a piece of bad news wrapped up in protein.” While they can evolve, viruses lack other key traits present in even simple life-forms like bacteria, including a cellular makeup and an internal metabolism. “They can mimic life, but…

In a not-so-distant future, when a burbling stream cascading down the Rocky Mountains appears in your dreams, you might be skeptical of who planted it there. While the notion of a corporation seeding dreams in the sleeping mind sounds like a science fiction plot, some consumers began taking the idea seriously in 2021. That’s when Molson Coors ran an online video touting its “targeted dream incubation” campaign. The premise of the project was to plant images of Coors beer into the dreams of football fans before the 2021 Super Bowl. The company called it “the world’s largest dream study.” Some might call it a nightmare. Marketing studies are openly testing ways to use sleep and dream-hacking to drive purchasing behavior. The documentary-style ad online, which featured respected sleep researcher Deirdre…

A LONG SHADOW Soaring some 44,000 miles above Jupiter’s clouds, NASA’s Juno spacecraft had a front-row seat as the shadow of icy moon Ganymede — seen here as an elongated black circle — darkened the planet early last year. Though Jupiter likely lacks a solid surface, an observer positioned within this silhouette would have experienced a total eclipse of the Sun. Of course, such events are a dime a dozen on Jupiter — literally. The gas giant has dozens of moons, including four major satellites that orbit in the same plane as the Sun, and is marred by shadow at least once every 42 hours.…

SAUROPOD DINOSAURS — from classics like Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus to the recently-named Patagotitan — were giants of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The largest species could reach lengths exceeding 100 feet, with weight that could top 80 tons. And while there are multiple reasons why these reptiles grew to such imposing sizes, paleontologists are still uncovering the biological particulars. Among them, researchers have learned, were cushioned feet. Paleontologists have been pondering sauropod feet for a long time. Footprints and trackways left by these dinosaurs show that the bottoms of their feet had soft pads on the underside of the toes. (Modern elephants have a similar anatomical setup.) But it wasn’t until recently that researchers understood just how important these pillowy pedals were to the evolution of truly gargantuan dinosaurs. Although…

In the field of every soybean farmer, there lurks a potential curse. White mold, caused by the Sclerotinia sclerotiorum fungus, can hide in small masses called sclerotia under the soil. In wet, cool and shady conditions, the dormant fungi spring to life, sending out tendrils that launch spores skyward and onto the flowers of soybean plants. In a matter of weeks, the infection works its way inside the plant, leaving a white-furred husk in its place. Sclerotinia stem rot plagues farmers across the Midwest every year, causing more than $1.6 billion in losses in the past five years alone, says Damon Smith, an associate professor of plant pathology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Protecting against the fungus is tricky, he says, as farmers must apply a fungicide at exactly the…

On Feb. 11, 2016, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) unveiled the first direct detection of gravitational waves — produced, in this case, by the merger of two black holes, 1.3 billion light-years away. The announcement (and accompanying scientific paper) came 100 years after Albert Einstein’s 1916 prediction that such waves would be unleashed during violent events in the universe. Based on his new theory of general relativity, Einstein concluded that gravitational waves would form when massive objects accelerated through spacetime, creating outward-spreading ripples as they moved, just like the wake that follows a powerboat speeding across once-tranquil water. Three physicists — Barry Barish, Kip Thorne, and Rainer Weiss — received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for their “decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation…

The new wing at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History shows how nature can be a timeless muse in modern design. Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang Architects designed this towering atrium in the $431-million Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation. Its cavelike openings and stony arches are the result of concrete sprayed over rebar, where gravity rather than rigid forms shaped the walls and bridges. Beyond this grand entryway to the facility — slated to open this spring and connect a campus spanning four city blocks — visitors can explore an insectarium, dynamic exhibits and a free-flying butterfly vivarium that will contain up to 80 different living species. SHARE YOUR PHOTOS We want to feature your awe-inspiring “Science in Real Life” photos from your cities, nature,…