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1 week ago | 
discovermagazine.com | Sam Walters
What's better for your lungs? A breath full of dust from the moon or from a city on Earth? The answer seems simple enough - especially since the latter is experienced by humans each and every day. But a new study in Life Sciences in Space Research suggests that the healthier option is more surprising than you might think.
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1 week ago | 
discovermagazine.com | Sam Walters
In 2018, a team of archaeologists discovered a fragment of a sperm whale tooth at Valencina, a Copper Age archaeological site near Seville in southwest Spain. Deposited at the site over 4,000 years ago, the find represented one of the first discoveries from a Copper Age site in Spain, but its arrival at the site - some 40 miles from the sea - remained something of a mystery. A new study in solves much of this mystery.
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1 week ago | 
discovermagazine.com | Sam Walters
There are a lot of factors that push people toward conservation, from an interest in preserving species for their contributions to human health to an inclination to protect them for their control of pollutants, pests, or overpopulated prey. But one of the most powerful forces that causes people to support conservation is anthropomorphism - the tendency to see animals as similar to humans.
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1 week ago | 
discovermagazine.com | Sam Walters
According to a new meta-analysis in the journal Heart , t he risk of death due to cardiovascular disease is doubled in cannabis users. Not only that, it is also associated with a higher risk of stroke and acute coronary syndrome, which occurs when blood flow to the heart is suddenly stopped or reduced.
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2 weeks ago | 
discovermagazine.com | Sam Walters
According to the study authors, the research doesn't just have implications for bacterial neighborhoods; it also has implications for human health and medicine. By harnessing these bacterial weapons, it may be possible to build better targeted antibiotics, designed to overcome antibiotic resistance. Researchers have long known that some bacteria can be ruthless, using weapons like the T6SS to clear out their competition.
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2 weeks ago | 
discovermagazine.com | Sam Walters
The European Space Agency's (ESA's) Solar Orbiter is out of alignment with the rest of the Solar System. And that's a good thing. By orbiting the Sun outside of the Solar System's orbital plane, the spacecraft has captured the first clear images of the Sun's south pole . According to the ESA, these observations (and other observations to come) will provide important insights into the Sun and its activity, with implications for the whole solar system.
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2 weeks ago | 
discovermagazine.com | Sam Walters
A domestic dog or a wolf? The difference seems easy enough to spot today, but the distinction was not always so evident. For years, scientists struggled to determine whether a pair of frozen puppies from around 14,000 years ago were early domestic dogs or wolves. Now, a new analysis could bring this debate to a close, confirming that the frozen pups were probably not early domestic dogs, but wolves, based on the animals' bones, teeth, and soft tissues.
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2 weeks ago | 
discovermagazine.com | Sam Walters
Some infections are tougher to recover from than others. Take COVID-19 infections, for instance. According to a new study in Open Forum Infectious Diseases , people with COVID and COVID-like symptoms typically take around nine months to recover from their infections mentally, and around three months to recover from their infections physically, suggesting that mental recovery is a particularly lengthy process that requires more study and more medical attention.
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3 weeks ago | 
discovermagazine.com | Sam Walters
When the JWST started its operations, the COSMOS-Web team was eager to harness its power to peer into the deepest parts of the universe. The researchers were hoping to see the earliest galaxies, as well as the general environment around those galaxies, better than ever before. "We wanted to go beyond finding the most distant galaxies," Casey said.
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3 weeks ago | 
discovermagazine.com | Sam Walters
The Human History of Fire Burnt Fallow Deer Bones from Qesem Cave. Qesem Cave Project. (Image Credit: Tel Aviv University)Humans have used fire for a long time. In fact, the traces of fire found at archeological sites suggest that human fire use started around a million years ago or more, though that use wasn't widespread until later, around 400,000 years ago.
