Innehållsförteckning för December 2020 från Discover

Growing up in New Hampshire, I had no problem supporting the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence. In my youth, my home state was a hotbed for sightings of unidentified flying objects and alleged encounters with strange visitors from other worlds. We didn’t need Area 51—we had an area of our own, a patch of meadow on the family farm where my own father claimed to see mysterious lights in a triangular pattern hovering above him, then peeling off into the starry night faster than any airplane. Now, the old man was a famous teller of tall tales, but he wasn’t the only one with such stories. And given that we lived in an era when humans themselves were launching spacecraft into the heavens with some regularity, it didn’t seem so far-fetched…

When Galileo Galilei pointed his first telescope to the heavens in 1610, he discovered “congeries of innumerable stars” hidden in the band of light called the Milky Way. Our cosmos grew exponentially that day. Roughly three centuries later, the cosmic bounds exploded once again when astronomers built telescopes big enough to show the Milky Way is just one of many “island universes.” Soon they learned the universe was expanding, too, with galaxies retreating from each other at ever-accelerating speeds. Since then, ever-larger telescopes have shown the observable universe spans an incomprehensible 92 billion light-years across and contains perhaps 2 trillion galaxies. And yet, astronomers are still left wondering how much more universe is out there, beyond what they observe. “The universe has always been slightly larger than what we can…

You’ve probably heard of the Venus of Willendorf — or at least seen its photo. But if you want to beat your family at Jeopardy!, you’d better learn the backstory of one of the most iconic artifacts from the ancient world. Short, fat and nearly 30,000 years old, Venus of Willendorf is an Ice Age icon. Archaeologists found the 4-inch-tall figurine in 1908 during excavations along the Danube River in Austria. Since then, nearly 200 similar statuettes have surfaced across Europe, dating between 23,000 and 40,000 years old. Although modern scholars call these artifacts Venuses, after the Roman goddess of love and fertility, the actual sculptors lived at least 20 millennia before Classical Rome. It’s unclear why Ice Age people carved these figurines; researchers propose they served as fertility symbols,…

The Tangled Web We Weave: Inside the Shadow System That Shapes the Internet by James Ball Once championed as a platform for our would-be saviors, the internet has become a place for villains. (Sorry, Mark Zuckerberg.) But what if that’s a product of the system itself? In a gripping — and sadly, timely — tale, tech journalist Ball reveals the forces behind our screens, including the web’s original architects and the cable companies keeping the infrastructure itself connected. An Outsider’s Guide to Humans: What Science Taught Me About What We Do and Who We Are by Camilla Pang Biochemist Pang was only 5 years old when she started to feel like a stranger among fellow humans. After being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, generalized anxiety disorder and ADHD, she harnessed…

It’s easy to pin labels on Chuck Hoberman, but hard to stick with just one. He’s an inventor, an artist, a tinkerer. He’s a designer, an engineer, a transformer. He’s a toymaker — the brains behind the colorful, expanding Hoberman sphere, which you and your kids have been playing with since the early 1990s (and which earned a place in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection). Thematically, Hoberman’s work lands him at the intersection of art, architecture, design and playthings. Physically, he works sometimes from an airy room on the second floor of a house-turned-office-suite near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Cambridge office is tidy, with white walls and plenty of light. The surfaces are usually cleared, but today they’re cluttered with the material expressions of his geometric…

WHAT ROBOTS CAN’T DO (“Will A.I. Make Medicine More Human?” June 2020) I am a real fan of Dr. Topol and often listen to his well-informed opinion pieces on Medscape, but his views on mental health treatment expose a serious misunderstanding of how it actually works. While Dr. Topol waxes almost poetic about the relationship between the medical fellow and his patients, he somehow does not think that this pertains to mental health. Years of research into why and how psychotherapy works underscore that it is the relationship between the patient and the doctor that is healing. That people may be comfortable disclosing their “innermost secrets” to an avatar in no way suggests that disclosure and diagnosis are curative. It is analogous to suggesting that because an X-ray can see…

For many, the COVID-19 pandemic has reduced life to a sliver of what it was — with a restless feeling that nothing can be done to reclaim it. But there is one last crucial step for us to take before we can return to our pre-coronavirus lives: Get a COVID-19 vaccine when it’s available. “If we want a society where the economy is back and people can have weddings again with their relatives, we have to have substantial uptake [of a vaccine],” says Saad Omer, an infectious diseases epidemiologist and director of the Yale Institute for Global Health. The goal is reaching herd immunity — community protection from a virus that’s accrued once a sufficient percentage of the population is immune. In the U.S., early data suggested we will likely…

1 We’re living in an ice age. For most of the past 2.5 million years, much of the planet has been glaciated, as Antarctica still is today. 2 Our current, more hospitable geological epoch, the Holocene, is a brief respite; today’s glaciers have been in retreat for the past 12,000 years. 3 Geologists call this an interglacial, and caution us not to get used to it. Interglacials are caused by cyclical changes in Earth’s orbit, and have nothing to do with human-induced climate change. 4 The ice could be on schedule to return as soon as the next several millennia — but only if we don’t totally cook the planet in the interim. 5 The fact that the world was once iced over wasn’t known until the 19th century, when…

TO WALK IS TO BE HUMAN. We’re the only primate that gets around by standing up and putting one foot in front of the other. In the more than 4 million years that humanity’s ancestors have been bipedal, our ability to walk upright has allowed humankind to travel great distances and survive changing climates, environments and landscapes. But walking is more than just transportation. It also happens to be really good for us. Countless scientific studies have found that this simple act can provide a number of health benefits and help people live longer. In fact, a walking routine — if done properly — might be the only aerobic exercise people need. How much walking should one aim for? You’ve likely heard we need 10,000 steps a day. That’s about…

When I think “medieval science,” not much comes to mind — just a big, empty space between ancient Greek thinkers like Plato and Renaissance-era scientists like da Vinci or Galileo. But the Dark Ages may not have been as devoid of progress as its name implies; historian Falk argues it was actually an era brimming with scientific inquiry. Falk gives us an insider’s look at medieval science through the life of a single 14th-century Benedictine monk: John Westwyk. By following notes from Westwyk and his contemporaries — a sketched diagram of a sundial, musings scribbled in a manuscript’s margins — Falk is able to reconstruct the monk’s story. He takes readers from the meadows of Westwick to the halls of the University of Oxford, even voyaging across the sea to…

The measles vaccine is one of the most effective vaccines ever produced — it’s 97 percent effective after two doses. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of the annual flu vaccine fluctuates between about 40 and 60 percent. But that doesn’t mean you should skip your flu shot. The flu vaccine during the 2017–18 flu season was found to be only 40 percent effective, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that it still prevented 6.2 million infections and 5,700 deaths. What’s more, a 2017 CDC study published in Pediatrics found that flu vaccines reduce the risk of a child dying of influenza by 65 percent.…