Indholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2023 i Discover

GONE ARE the days of traffic jams solely being a problem for drivers on their way to work: We now have to consider satellite congestion in outer space, too. The growing number of active satellites is positively correlated to risks such as overlapping orbits and debris collision. And with the number of impending launches growing, experts are exploring how low Earth orbit (LEO) — the area around the Earth that has an altitude of less than 1,000 kilometers, or 620 miles — can accommodate the increasing number of satellites the private sector is projected to deploy. While LEO has not yet reached rushhour levels of congestion, it’s certainly on its way, according to Jonathan Rasmussen, an aerospace engineer who has studied the risk factors associated with orbital debris. “I hesitate…

DINOSAURS LIVED relatively long lives. The oldest Tyrannosaurus rex specimens that we’ve found were alive for about 30 years, and it’s likely that many dinosaurs lived much longer than that. But with long lives and aging comes diseases. According to Penélope Cruzado-Caballero, an assistant professor of paleontology at the University of La Laguna in Spain, studying the signs of disease left in fossils tells us that dinosaurs lived with a diverse set of ailments. That fossil-based methodology does have limitations: “In most cases, we can only know about diseases that attacked the bones,” says Cruzado-Caballero. In addition, the dinosaur would have needed to live long enough to be affected by the disease — yet much of the fossil record is made up of teenage dinosaurs, not adults, and many of them…

Night falls in the Black Rock Forest in Cornwall, New York. I walk the path to the reservoir without a flashlight. Even though a new moon shines brightly, the trees shroud the forest floor. I tread lightly to avoid falling off the trail into the brook, where bullfrogs croak and peepers peep. In the shadowy woods, a pair of eyes twinkles between the shrubbery. I sense what I hope is a deer tracking me; this is black bear territory, after all. The 3,920-acre Black Rock Forest and field station in the Hudson Highlands have drawn environmental scientists since 1929. The governing body offers small grants for research in wildlife, invasive plant species and carbon sequestration, among other topics. I was there to join a science-writing group, convening for a hike…

(“Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Pop Culture,” May/June 2023) Matt Benoit’s article on voice cloning was both illuminating and frightening. You could quickly grasp many of the ways that voices could be cloned, probably quite easily given the access to online AI nowadays — but some of those uses will undoubtedly be nefarious. If there is one thing history teaches us, it’s that fraudsters and criminals usually adapt quicker to new technologies than governments and law enforcement. Imagine a future in which you’ll need some app or program to tell you if the person calling you for help is really your family member or some clever fake.…

MOUSE GLOWS FROM NOSE TO TOES No, this colorful collage isn’t an art project. Rather, these eerily glowing dormice demonstrate the rodents’ photoluminescence, or their ability to absorb and reemit ultraviolet light. Researchers at the Tallinn Zoo in Estonia found that the brownish-white fur of the garden dormouse (Eliomys quercinus) glowed bright purple under UV light (middle). If the light passed through a yellow filter, the mice’s fur emitted a crimson hue (right), while their noses and feet shone a blue-green color. The phenomenon has been seen in other species, including flying squirrels that appear pink and platypuses that shine blue — but for now, the reasons why these mammals gleam remain a mystery.…

Trevor looked miserable — pale, exhausted and sweating with fever. His throat burned, his joints ached and his stomach turned with nausea. Although only 13, he had never felt this sick in his life. He had gone to karate the day before, but had to sit down after doing just a couple moves. “He had COVID last month, now this,” his father lamented. “He can’t seem to catch a break. He’s missed so much school.” I’ve heard similar laments from many parents in the pediatric emergency department recently. By the fall of 2022, as masking declined and social gatherings increased, kids were coming down with all sorts of viruses they had been sheltered from for years. Trevor had symptoms common to many viruses that were circulating in the community, including…

You can donate your someday-dead self to science. Just sign before witnesses at the bottom of a consent form laden with legalese: “Being age eighteen years or over, and of sound mind and under no duress or coercion, I hereby voluntarily offer as an unrestricted gift, my body, after death, for education, research and the advancement of science.” So begins the three-page consent for the anatomical gift program at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. Each year around 100 adults sign that form, volunteering to become cadavers that will be dissected by UMass med students during their anatomy classes or probed by scientists developing medical devices. Nationwide, around 20,000 individuals in the U.S. gift their bodies to scientific research and education annually. That figure has nearly doubled over the…

One year before the U.S. Civil War ended, an embargo had brought the southern ice trade to a halt, causing the region’s chefs, bartenders, nurses and doctors to lose access to the northern ice they’d come to rely on for preserving food, making drinks and healing bodies. Without ice, the South was suffering. What they didn’t know was that 20 years before the war began, a relatively unknown doctor living in the port town of Apalachicola, Florida, had found a way to bring ice to the South that didn’t depend on shipments from the North. Against all tional scientific thinking of the day, the doctor, John Gorrie, had discovered how to make ice himself. His ice-making machine would eventually change how Americans use and think of ice. It made…

JUST MINUTES into his latest six-part docuseries The End Is Nye, Bill Nye gets drenched in a rainstorm. Later on, a hurricane sends him hurtling into a car’s windshield. In a subsequent episode, he explodes in a fiery inferno after being struck by debris from a wayward comet. Don’t worry: Nye, the science educator and engineer who became a household name in the ’90s thanks to his muchloved Bill Nye the Science Guy show, meets his (fictional) demise in every single episode. In a recent interview with Discover, Nye explains the apocalyptic framing behind his biggestbudget series yet: “We need to scare people.” THE SERIES, released on Peacock in 2022, walks viewers through six scientifically plausible mass disasters — from the eruption of a supervolcano to a global blackout triggered…

A GROWING body of research is making some surprising discoveries about insects: Honeybees have emotional ups and downs. Bumblebees play with toys. Cockroaches have personalities, recognize their relatives and team up to make decisions. Fruit flies experience something very like what we might call fear. Insects having emotions is not a new idea. In 1872, Charles Darwin wrote, “Even insects express anger, terror, jealousy and love.” If insects have fun with toys or flee in fear when you brandish the flyswatter — and if those expressions of anger, terror, jealousy and love reflect something on the inside — then it’s possible that insects have emotions, sentience or even consciousness. Drop that flyswatter right now! We don’t know what’s on the inside — at least, not yet. But neuroscientists and philosophers…

The elderly man woke up one night to find himself in a bed soaked with blood. His wife, lying next to him, was dead, stabbed with a letter opener. The man was charged with murder, though he claimed to have no memory of what had happened. The defense attorney was stumped, because there was no plausible motive for his client to have killed his wife. The couple had been together for decades, and everything suggested a harmonious, loving relationship with no signs of strife; nor were there mitigating factors like alcohol or drug intoxication. Was it possible, the attorney wondered, that his client had been asleep when his wife was killed and thus was unaware of what he might have done? While many might deem a scenario like that preposterous,…

Paresh Patel used to be afraid of needles. Then he volunteered to catch COVID-19. When an email arrived with news that scientists at the University of Oxford in the U.K. were looking for volunteers willing to be infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, Patel signed up. He had already caught and survived COVID in October 2020. Other than losing his senses of smell and taste for a few days, the experience was unremarkable. And at 27 years old, he was young, fit, and had no preexisting conditions, so he wasn’t worried about possible risks like blood clots, breathing difficulties, or even death. “The only thing, weirdly, that I was worried about was the needles,” he says. Patel hoped that he could help scientists study the virus — and do a little…

Ashley had just begun to dig into the cream-sauce pasta when it occurred — that familiar, urgent need to find the bathroom. She was dining at a friend’s house, with many other guests. “I need to get out of here,” the teenager thought as she started to sweat. To avoid unwanted questions, Ashley devised an excuse to leave and rushed out of the gathering. She stopped at two gas station bathrooms as she sped toward her house. “I was in so much pain I was crying by the time I got home,” she says. Similar episodes plagued her well into adulthood. The culprit: irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). “When I was having an IBS attack, it was an immediate fight-or-flight response,” Ashley recalls. “I just wanted to get myself out of…