Indholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2023 i Discover

GROWING UP in the 1970s, I was obsessed with all kinds of global threats. Not climate change or nuclear war, mind you, but important things — well, important to a 10-year-old. Like quicksand. If shows and movies were anything to go by, it was a constant menace the moment you set an unwary foot in the woods. Or killer bees! They were coming, we were warned for years. And those were just natural threats. Meanwhile, unnatural hazards preyed on my mind, thanks to shows like In Search Of …, hosted by Leonard Nimoy and devoted to mysteries and strange phenomena. I realize now, of course, that such programs had no more relation to real science than Mr. Spock did. Nevertheless, that show sharpened my resolve to plumb the depths of…

IN THE 1970S, Stephen Hawking discovered something impossibly wrong with black holes: It was mathematically possible for them to shrink or even disappear. If a black hole disappeared, that would mean that everything it had sucked in disappeared too. And in physics, stuff isn’t supposed to just disappear — it can change its form, but its component subatomic information still needs to exist in the universe. In other words, black holes, by their sheer existence, are capable of destroying information about subatomic particles that (according to quantum physics) shouldn’t be able to be destroyed. This problem, called the black hole information paradox, has plagued physics for decades. But theoretical physicist Samir Mathur has proposed a solution: changing the way we think of black holes and picturing them instead as “fuzzballs.”…

MAYBE YOU became a brussels sprouts convert in your late teens. Or perhaps you were addicted to sweet stuff as a kid, only to grow out of it later. It might have taken until adulthood for you to start craving bitter foods and drinks like sautéed kale or a martini with olives. Sure, it’s a given that we like different foods at different points in our lives — and a glut of research backs that up, too. But what’s perhaps less understood is why our tastes change as we get older. “These senses [of taste and smell] change during development, but the brain is also plastic, and it learns; we perceive these flavors with our brain,” says Julie Mennella, a biopsychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. “One…

I walked briskly to the emergency department to see a new consult, wolfing down a protein bar on the way. When I got there, I saw the patient in question calmly sitting up on a stretcher, surrounded by a group of trendy-looking young adults. The patient, Chad, was a 20-year-old man who had been brought to our hospital by some of his college classmates. Chad was dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt, and he obviously needed a shave and a shower. His hair stuck out at odd angles, clearly not having been combed for some time. He presented a stark contrast to his well-dressed and groomed friends. Chad himself did not have what physicians call a “chief complaint,” or a specific reason for coming to the doctor. Rather, his…

If you were to drown in the Thames River in the late 18th century, your best chance of survival would be for a good Samaritan to pull you from the water and carry you to a receiving house outfitted with basic medical equipment — possibly even located in the pub you had just stumbled out of — established by the local life-saving organization, the Royal Humane Society. There, medical assistants who had been trained for exactly this kind of rescue would begin the work of bringing you back from sudden death. They would strip you bare, dry you off, and clean your mouth and nostrils. They would warm your body, either by rubbing your skin with wool or heated brandy, or by laying you near a fire. And then one…

Transportation: Lake Titicaca can be reached by bus from Lima or Cusco, both of which have international airports. Lodging: Visitors can either stay in Puno or book a room on one of the floating islands through Airbnb. Staying on an island provides the chance to get to know locals, creating a personal experience that differs from a shorter group tour. Tours: If you stay in Puno, you can access the islands via boating or kayaking tours. Guides can be booked through hotels and hostels in Puno. If you stay on an island, usually your host will act as your guide. Activities: Depending on your tour guide, you can explore the islands, learn how they are made, talk to islanders about the history and culture of the islands, and buy clothing…

A ROCKY JOURNEY (“New Life From an Old Rock,” Mar/Apr 2023) The article by Elise Cutts suggests the Mars rock reopened some avenues for NASA to continue doing what they do best: namely, exploring the cosmos. But finding this rock in Antarctica raised two puzzling questions for me: How could anybody know if this lump of stone is from Mars? The find happened before the Mars explorers landed there. And given the distance and dynamics of two planets in orbit, how did it wind up on Earth? Mel Goddard STEPHEN C. GEORGE, STORY EDITOR AND DISCOVER EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, RESPONDS: Great questions, Mel! First, you are correct that in 1993, when ALH84001 was identified as being from Mars, we were still a few years away from putting rovers on the Red…

IF YOU’VE ever caught a delicious whiff of freshly cut grass, you’ve communicated with a plant: Those blades of grass are actually crying for help by warning of potential danger. A growing body of research shows that when plants are damaged, they emit airborne chemicals. Scientists have long pondered the question of whether — and how — plants communicate. For years, the topic sparked controversy. Pseudoscientific books like 1973’s The Secret Life of Plants seemingly undermined the credibility of early research in the field by suggesting that plants thrive if you, say, sing or play classical music. Such statements were later debunked: Any empirical evidence that music helps plants grow is flimsy at best. Still, researchers remain adamant that there is some sort of communication going on between plants —…

MINDFULNESS is such a buzzword. We all want it, but our ability to attain it is fleeting. We fear life is passing us by, and as the world moves faster and faster, living in the present moment seems even more difficult. But while mindfulness may be touted as a key to happiness, mind-wandering is the key to our survival as a species. According to Michael Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University, humans evolved to prioritize attention — a crucially important process in the brain that has taken millions of years to perfect. “Having your attention nailed on external sensory events happening in the moment is of great importance during fight or flight moments,” says Graziano. But the other side of it is also important: When our…

Robert Hoare first spotted the elusive Izatha psychra, an endangered moth in New Zealand, on a warm night in 2005. At the center of the country’s South Island, amid the fenced flats and sloping hills of the Pukaki Scientific Reserve, the entomologist erected a generator-powered light trap. Then, an hour before midnight — just as the generator’s fuel threatened to peter out and plunge everything into darkness — he glimpsed fluttering wings and a flash of gray. Hoare is one of only a handful of people who can claim to have encountered the moth, as fewer than a dozen have ever been seen. All of these sightings occurred either in the dry shrublands and scrub of the Mackenzie District that encompasses the 79-acre reserve, or in the neighboring district of…

IN 1922, a team of archaeologists led by Howard Carter (pictured above) stumbled across the final resting place of Tutankhamun, a historically unimportant pharaoh who happened to be buried alongside the biggest, best-preserved stash of ancient Egyptian artifacts ever found. Since then, Tut has become one of the most recognizable rulers in Egypt’s history, while his treasures — ranging from golden masks to glittering daggers — have gained their own rich reputations. And they’re only getting richer. Even today, the Egyptologists that study these objects uncover surprising evidence that they were swapped, stolen and even sourced from far-flung, extraterrestrial settings.…

It’s easy to see why researchers might be confused. The art of iron smelting, or melting and manipulating iron ore, is thought to have appeared in the Near East around 1200 B.C., some 120 years after the sealing of the tomb. If smelting was off the table, how might the dagger have been made? The late Takafumi Matsui, then president of the Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan, visited the weapon at the Egyptian Museum in 2020 to find out. “A number of manufacturing processes are possible,” he and his colleagues wrote in Meteoritics & Planetary Science in 2022, “such as cold working, in which an iron meteorite is cut and polished; hot working, involving high-temperature melting and subsequent casting; or low-temperature heating and subsequent forging.” Ultimately, the chemical and…

Ironically, blowing smoke into the rectum may have been preferred to blowing smoke into a drowning victim’s mouth: “In 18th-century England, the practice of placing one’s mouth on the mouth of a lifeless adult was considered particularly repugnant,” writes Mickey Eisenberg in Life in the Balance: Emergency Medicine and the Quest to Reverse Sudden Death. Midwives had likely been practicing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on their neonatal patients for centuries, but were often isolated from and looked down upon by the medical profession; historical analyses refer to their technique as “inelegant,” “undignified” and “the method practised [sic] by the vulgar to restore stillborn children.” By the late 1700s, though, doctors in Europe began to recognize the value in the practice of forcing air into sudden-death victims’ lungs, advocating it to and through…

These milky swirls of chartreuse, purple, red and blue are commonplace in Alaska, Canada and Scandinavia. Th is year, however, the ethereal northern lights have made appearances in dozens of the lower 48 U.S. states, even dancing across dark skies as far south as Arizona last spring. And you can expect similar spectacular shows over the next few years. That’s due in part to an 11-year cycle within our sun’s atmosphere. Essentially, every 11 years the solar magnetic field temporarily collapses — or “looks like a bowl of spaghetti for a while,” according to space physicist Don Hampton of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks — then reverses. Th is cyclical shift is forecast to peak in late 2024 to 2025, bringing an influx of solar storms,…

TRASHY TIDES Tethered to self-made floats of trapped air and mucus, Janthina sea snails follow the flow of the ocean — all the way to a swirling muddle twice the size of Texas, spotted with plastic debris. That’s where researchers found them when they sailed more than 300 nautical miles to arrive at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch n 2019. Sampling the surface of the patch — which forms where many ocean currents meet in the North Pacific — the team found a surprising concentration of drifting creatures, including the jellyfish-esque tentacled blue button and by-the-wind sailors, oval-shaped organisms with distinctive sails for gliding along ocean currents. Reporting their results in PLOS Biology in 2023, the researchers say the currents create a space for floating organisms to mate and share…

THOUGH PROVING to be a daydream tool for many industries, ChatGPT is quickly becoming a nightmare for academia. As of January 2023, four separate research papers have cited the AI chatbot as a co-author in a research project — forcing scientific journals to scramble to update their policies and regulations addressing possible ethical problems. The process of adding an author who made little to no contribution to a scientific paper is called honorary authorship, and it’s caused some serious ethical issues in the past. One of the earliest of these issues occurred in the mid-1970s and involved, surprisingly, a cat. In 1975, Jack Hetherington, a University of Michigan physics professor, had just finished writing an influential paper on changing particle behaviors at different temperatures. The paper was due to be…

Tom Kluge was at home getting ready for work when he got the call from an emergency command center dispatch. It was Nov. 8, 2018, and a wildland fire had been spotted northeast of Pulga, a remote community tucked away in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains about 35 miles from where Kluge was stationed. At the time a fire captain specialist and 16-year veteran of a division of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection known as Cal Fire, Kluge had multiple responsibilities. He was a law enforcement officer for Cal Fire’s sprawling, 31-million-acre jurisdiction. He was weapons certified and able to make arrests like any state trooper. He was also a qualified wildland fire investigator. On the day of the call, Kluge’s situational awareness was on high alert.…

But the 48-year-old archaeologist, Howard Carter, sensed otherwise, emboldened by earlier discoveries bearing the name of a pharaoh whose body had yet to be found. Carter was right, and on Nov. 4, 1922, he and his team identified a stairway leading down to a tomb door. After years of excavation, they reached the tomb’s inner chamber and found a mummified pharaoh, adorned with a gleaming, golden mask. At the time of the discovery, archaeologists didn’t know much about the pharaoh — a boy who took the name of Tutankhamun and ruled Egypt for around a decade. Over a century later, they still struggle to piece together his history, including the details of his death. But recent research into Tut’s mask, the most iconic item found inside the tomb, has started…

But some of these items never made it to Cairo. They disappeared during the decade-long excavation, only to turn up today, in museum collections and auction sites across the U.S. and Europe. The only logical explanation, experts say, is that they were diverted by none other than Carter himself. WITHIN ONE MONTH of the identification of the tomb steps, Carter and his team had cleared the stairs of debris and breached the door of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Th us began the daunting task of recording and removing the thousands of treasures inside. To start, the members of the team took photos of the artifacts in the tomb. They then transported those items to a nearby archaeology studio, where they were classified, conserved and photographed further, before being transported to Cairo, as…

Astronomical websites and press releases brim with pictures of swirling gas giants, watery terrestrial worlds, and strange planetary systems with exotic suns. But just how realistic are these artist’s concepts? Do they truly show newly discovered worlds, or are they simply fanciful pictures meant to draw you into reading about the latest addition to the exoplanetary menagerie? “These aren’t just people slapping up a new exoplanet template every time that one is discovered. This is a real depiction, if we can have one,” says prominent exoplanet artist Lynette Cook, who has been illustrating other worlds since 1995. “It’s based on scientific fact, as far as the facts go that we have. And then beyond that, it’s fact-based theory.” Even when artistic license is involved — which it often is —…

Stepping onto one of the Uros islands in southern Peru can feel like walking on a bouncy castle. Your feet sink a bit into the mushy floor, which trembles slightly when a motorboat speeds past. That’s because this land is actually floating — on the largest lake in South America, located 12,500 feet above sea level in the Andes Mountains. Hundreds of miles south of Peru’s famous Machu Picchu ruins, dozens of artificial islands pepper the surface of Lake Titicaca, situated along the border of Peru and Bolivia. The veritable floating city made of roots and reeds is currently home to about 2,000 residents. For visitors, the structures demonstrate a living version of pre-Columbian engineering that’s far more accessible than the Inca citadel to the north. For locals, they form…