Indholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2022 i Discover

One of the things that makes us human is our awareness of our own mortality. Yet for nearly as long as we’ve known that we’ll one day die, we’ve wondered about the possibility of waking back up. Stories about resurrection and immortality are found in countless religions and myths, and in recent years, many of these stories have hinged on the idea of cryonic preservation: freezing a body and then reanimating it in the future. If it worked for Han Solo, Captain America, and Fry from Futurama, why can’t it work for us? “[For] most cryonicists, there’s two things you’ll find: We are sci-fi lovers, obviously. We’re also optimists,” says Dennis Kowalski, the president of the Cryonics Institute, a non-profit based in Michigan and one of a handful of companies…

In the bitter cold winter of 2017, British Columbia’s minister of energy and mines discovered that someone had staked a mining claim in his actual backyard. The request had come without notice or warning. If approved, it would allow the people behind it to pan for precious minerals in streambeds on his Cranbrook, B.C., property, less than 50 miles north of the U.S. border. “The claim is not going to pay off for them,” then-Minister Bill Bennet told The Province at the time; his home sits high and dry on a forested hill with no streams to explore. But the people behind the permit weren’t looking to strike a claim. They were a group of First Nations women led by Bev Sellars, a former chief of the Xat’sull First Nation,…

Citizen science gives curious people the opportunity to become extra sets of hands, eyes and ears in real scientific research. Bringing many people together to document endangered species, monitor water quality or watch the stars makes it possible to do science on larger scales and tackle bigger research questions. Here are just five of the hundreds of citizen science projects that you can participate in. (They can all be found at SciStarter.org.) Nature’s Notebook Volunteers in this project “take the pulse of the planet” by documenting changes in plants, animals and insects to help scientists understand how ecosystems are being affected by climate change. You can join a regional campaign like Mayfly Watch or Pesky Plant Trackers, or choose from over 1,400 species to watch in North America. Then, log…

Stars and galaxies move around us at a pace that seems glacial on human time scales. Their dance is exceedingly gradual, taking place over billions of years. But if we could see time the same way the stars do, the neighborhood around our Milky Way Galaxy would appear surprisingly active. Galaxies swing around one another, slowly spiraling together until they merge. Many don’t travel alone but bring companions with them, in a dark collision that may tear some stars from the heart of their homes and splay them across the sky. Other regions grow rich in gas and dust and begin, in their newfound opulence, to birth new stars. The dance of the galaxies is slow and violent, filled with both life and death. The Milky Way drives the motion…

THE SCIENCE OF NDES (“Can Science Explain Near-Death Experiences?”, Sept/Oct 2021) Your recent article opened with an insightful interview of Dr. Bruce Greyson, who has spent more than four decades seeking a deeper scientific understanding of consciousness through the lens of near-death experiences (NDEs). Dr. Greyson and two medical colleagues spent two years extensively reviewing the 600-page medical record of my 2008 illness. They concluded that my memories during a seven-day coma could not be construed as hallucination, dream or delirium because of the extensive damage to my neocortex. Two professionals selected [in the article] to comment on my case offered no comparable scientific opinion. Kevin Nelson’s REM intrusion hypothesis explaining NDEs as a dream phenomenon has been broadly criticized. Given the extensive damage to my neocortex, my medically documented…

To hug or not to hug? That’s the question right now. We’re in a precarious place in the world of greetings etiquette. Depending on where you live, many of us are vaccinated. But it’s hard to know for sure before you embrace whether or not the person you’re leaning into has gotten the jab. At the same time, many of us are yearning for the warmth of a hug after long stretches of social isolation. Humans, according to experts, biologically need touch, and a good long hug is one of the best ways to get it. Suzanne Degges-White, a professor and researcher focused on social relationships at Northern Illinois University, says that our need for a hug goes all the way back to the survival of our species. When we’re…

Slowly and deliberately, I searched shallow, underwater outcrops covered in colors. Weightless amidst the invisible push and pull of the current, pink coralline algae hung closely to rock surfaces or branched skyward against sporadic patches of neon green and glimmering iridescence. Shades of yellow, brown, white and orange flora began to appear as I drifted past micro-environments dictated by sunlight and structure. I allowed my scientific brain to go to work underwater, relying on one of my first developed senses: observation. I had come to this underwater world to seek out a nudibranch. I had heard of this elusive marine organism, but until recently, knew almost nothing about it. My goal at the moment was just to find one, to examine it with my own eyes. I’ve always been drawn…

HIS DAYS WOULD start promptly, like a banker’s — except he also worked weekends. At 8:30 each morning, Terry Manning would step outside his two-story brick house on Gipsy Lane in Leicester, England, walk through the yard, let himself in the house next door, climb the stairs and take a seat at his workbench, with a view onto the garden out back. There he sat for the next nine hours or so, surrounded by dozens of sand-colored eggs ranging in size from 1½ to 20 inches long. Soaking in plastic bowls of acid, these eggs were originally laid some 75 million to 85 million years ago by dinosaurs living in what is now China. Manning would break from his station around 5:30 p.m., head downstairs, watch the news and eat,…

POLKA-DOTTED DESERT The origins of this desert grassland phenomenon — equally spaced 10-to-50-foot barren patches called fairy circles — have long confounded scientists. Millions of these circular spots stretch across the fringes of certain deserts in western Australia, as well as Namibia (pictured above) and other parts of southern Africa. In 1979, South African botanist G.K. Theron suggested that dying shrubs may poison the sandy soil and curb grass growth, leaving the circles behind. But this theory doesn’t hold water, according to researchers from Germany’s University of Göttingen. The team visited four decomposed shrub locations once observed by Theron and failed to find fairy circles there. A more likely cause? Certain desert grasses build a perfect circle to maximize their water consumption and stave off competition, the scientists suggest, in…

Space weather is not something that most of us typically think about on a daily basis. But the Sun’s charged particles and magnetic field are constantly sweeping through space and colliding with the Earth’s own magnetic field. Occasionally, the auroras fill the sky with light dancing along these field lines. The most extreme space weather, however, happens when the Sun blasts billions of tons of energized particles directly towards the Earth at speeds up to 1,800 miles per second. These explosions, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), lift off from the Sun’s outer atmosphere — the corona — and can cause intense geomagnetic storms and negatively affect astronauts, satellites, and spacecraft. SPACE ODDITIES Geomagnetic storms happen when the Earth’s magnetic field is disturbed. The most extreme geomagnetic storms are driven by…

She didn’t want to be a scientist when she grew up. As a kid, Darlene Cavalier was more interested in cheerleading and dancing than in learning how to crunch numbers and snag awards at science fairs. “I was a good student,” she explains. But science just wasn’t her thing. That might seem like an unexpected start for someone like Cavalier, who’s since made her mark on the lives of countless scientists and their work. Today, she’s the founder and director of SciStarter, a national organization that connects citizen scientists with established researchers working on large-scale, data-driven projects. She’s also the founder of Science Cheerleader, an organization for current and former professional cheerleaders pursuing careers in science. At the heart of Cavalier’s work is a common thread: a mission to connect…

The night after their wedding in 1954, my grandparents sat on the bed in their motel room, counting the cash in my grandpa’s pockets. There was barely enough to open a bank account. So, the next morning, Eleanor Lowenthal — my grandmother — in desperate need of income to put her husband through graduate school, walked into the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. There, she convinced some of the most prominent scientists in the world that she was the perfect person to mount and catalog their burgeoning ant collection. At the time, a promising graduate student named E.O. Wilson was coming up in the department. Wilson, who passed away in December 2021 at the age of 92, was called the “father of biodiversity” and the “heir of Darwin.” The myrmecologist…