Innehållsförteckning för September/October 2022 från Discover

FOSSILIZED FOOTSTEPS Ancient humans — mainly children and teenagers — left these tracks along the muddy shoreline of a former lake between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. That makes the 61 footprints, found in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park and reported in Science last year, the oldest known in North America. The finding is forcing some archaeologists to walk back by thousands of years long-standing estimates of when humans first ventured to the continent from Asia. In fact, by the time the next wave of migrants arrived, the descendants of these earliest Americans might still have been around to greet them.…

SINGERS SEEM to have a talent for foreign tongues — most notably when it comes to pronunciation and accent. That’s because, like parrots, they mimic what they hear. It’s something that Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti, who couldn’t read music, did with his operatic singing. “The singer is the best with the accent,” says Susanne Reiterer, a neurolinguistics researcher at the University of Vienna in Austria. “A foreign accent is a piece of cake for them.” Since talking uses the same biological makeup as singing, says Reiterer, the two must be related both biologically and neurobiologically. “It’s almost like two sides of one coin.” Studies reveal that Heschl’s gyrus, a type of ridge on the brain’s surface that contains the primary auditory cortex, plays a significant role in both musical and…

Marauders, brutes, barbarians: The fabled Viking people (or Norsemen) have long been portrayed as cruel warriors whose way of life included little more than pillaging and plundering. To be fair, they did engage in plenty of raiding: From A.D. 800 to the 11th century, many Scandinavians departed what we now know as Norway, Sweden and Denmark in search of riches. Throughout much of Europe and as far as modern-day Russia, Iceland and North America, the nomadic sailors engaged in trade, exploration and war. But the Vikings also spent extended periods in foreign locales, leaving lasting marks of a rich culture that modern depictions often overlook.…

My husband and I were eating out with our son, Eddie, who was then 2, when a couple came in with a young boy wearing headphones and staring at an iPad as he walked. For the entire meal, the boy was glued to his screen while his parents chatted amicably as if he wasn’t there. “What’s the point of having a kid if you’re not going to talk to him?” I said to my husband. We vowed not to buy our son an electronic device until he’s 30. And video games, one of the main reasons children want these devices, would be verboten. So far we’ve stuck to that agreement, though it has not been easy. When other parents would go out for a meal and hand their child a…

WHENEVER YOU read text, your brain processes the visual stimuli to create meaning and understand the content. Chances are, you don’t pay much attention to the way the information is presented — particularly the font choice. That’s because your main objective is reading comprehension, not aesthetics. Although typography is overlooked by most of us (excluding design enthusiasts), it’s crucial in rendering texts legible, readable and appealing for audiences. Beyond the visual aspect, research shows that fonts play a significant role in the cognitive processes that transpire while we read. A font’s impact on the way you learn and retain information might be hard to notice consciously, but your brain is certainly tuned in. Perhaps surprisingly, hard-to-read fonts such as Bodoni, Comic Sans or Monotype Corsiva are better for retaining information…

IT SOUNDS LIKE something out of science fiction: fetuses suspended in fluid-filled transparent bags, their blood flowing through a network of tubes hooked up to machines. But it’s not a speculative look at a dark future — research into artificial wombs is already underway, as a means of hopefully one day saving babies born too soon. The idea of artificial wombs might conjure up scenes from movies like The Matrix, but it’s something humans have been mulling over for a century — English biologist J.B.S. Haldane coined the term ectogenesis (from the Greek for “outer” and “origin”) in 1923, and the concept played into the 1932 novel Brave New World. Scientists at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet published diagrams on artificial wombs in 1958, and researchers in Japan and Korea made major…

Vinland, or the “land of wine,” isn’t listed on any modern map. A thousand years ago, however, it served as the stage for a seminal moment in world history. Icelandic sagas record it as the place where, 500 years before Christopher Columbus ever sailed a ship, the Vikings became the first Europeans to set foot in the so-called “New World,” even building a short-lived settlement. By the late A.D. 980s, these Norse seafarers had already established colonies in Iceland and Greenland, the Atlantic steppingstones that brought them within range of the Canadian coast. From there, according to the oral reports of the time (written down two centuries later in The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Erik the Red), the Vikings stumbled upon North America around A.D. 1000.…

Hopeful news about coral is hard to come by these days. That’s part of the reason images of this extraordinary reef in French Polynesia made the media rounds early this year. Located off the coast of Tahiti, its rose-shaped colonies stretch continuously across nearly 2 miles of seafloor. But at a depth around 150 feet in the South Pacific, the reef remained mostly uncharted until last year, when coral biologist Laetitia Hédouin paid it a visit after a tip from a local dive shop. The combination of its size, depth and pristine quality was startling. “It’s like a treasure,” Hédouin says, describing the mature coral as virtually untouched by climate change. “The question is: How long will it survive?” Studies indicate that coral coverage globally shrunk by half between the…

CRACKING THE EGG (“Waiting to Hatch,” Mar/Apr 2022) This was a fun read; any time that my ignorance is challenged, my time is well spent. I learned several things about the importance of documentation and proof of origin along with custody control. The one thing that I didn’t learn was when one or more of these eggs are opened to science, what do you expect to learn? My guess is that answer depends on what you find beyond the visible. Richard Fyfe FEATURES EDITOR TIMOTHY MEINCH RESPONDS: Great question, with a complicated answer. As you guessed, what scientists expect to learn from Manning’s egg specimens depends on many factors, including what species they are analyzing. In this case, scanning the dinosaur embryos with a synchrotron (a massive particle accelerator with…

WHILE HUMANS may have perfected the art of eavesdropping — even at a great distance, if tapped phone lines or cyberattacks are any indication — they aren’t the only animals listening in to the conversations around them. Birds commonly eavesdrop on the alarm calls of other avian species to avoid danger, despite not fully understanding these “foreign languages,” or seeing the predator that triggered them in the first place. Wild superb fairywrens (pictured on the right) can be trained to flee from unfamiliar sounds in just a few days. Australian National University scientists achieved this by simultaneously broadcasting these noises with the alarm calls of fairywrens and other birds, which the territorial fairywrens quickly learned to associate with one another. But birds chatter when they feel safe from danger, too,…

Allison came to the emergency department late one morning complaining of intractable chest pain, nausea and vomiting. A 23-year-old graduate student, Allison was halfway through a Ph.D. program in molecular biology. Initially thinking she was having a heart attack, the ED physician obtained an electrocardiogram and a chest X-ray, both of which came back normal. Blood tests looking for signs of a drug overdose had also come back negative. With cardiac distress ruled out, the next symptoms to address were the nausea and vomiting. Thinking she may be suffering from an ulcer, the ED physician asked me to come down to evaluate the patient. Nausea and vomiting are common complaints, usually related to gastrointestinal infections like food poisoning and rotavirus, among other causes. But as soon as I saw her,…

On Nov. 30, 1803, military physician Francisco Xavier de Balmis set off from the port of La Coruña in northwest Spain on what would become a three-year mission. On board with him were 22 orphan boys. Their goal: to complete the first global immunization campaign. The world was then riddled with smallpox, which killed one-third of all infected. Though Edward Jenner had discovered in 1797 that pus from a cow’s cowpox blisters could be used as a vaccine, the majority of the world had no access to the inoculation. Cowpox was such a local disease, mostly found in England and occasionally France or Italy, that it was unclear how anyone could scale vaccination to more people. Scientists had yet to discover germ theory, so no one knew what a virus…