D
Discover Magazine Blogs
blogs.discovermagazine.com · Group blog · on HN since 2008
Discover Magazine hosts science blogs by multiple writers covering biology, psychology, genetics, space, and research news.
What HN saysHN links it for science write-ups, such as the Miller experiment follow-up, parasitic wasps, and photography features, and as a source for claims.
671HN people shared it
292linked it in comments
884stories submitted
9.9Kstory points
6 years agolast shared
2008people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1How food-breaks sway the decisions of judges11 people · 120 points · first shared 2011 · 29 comments on HN
- 2Resolving the iPhone resolution8 people · 18 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 3How tiny wasps cope with being smaller than amoebas7 people · 249 points · first shared 2011 · 69 comments on HN
- 4Predatory Journals Hit by ‘Star Wars’ Sting6 people · 33 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 51 in 200 of men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan6 people · 32 points · first shared 2011 · 29 comments on HN
- 6Scientists, your gender bias is showing5 people · 3 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 7Blood and Fog: The Military's Germ Warfare Tests in San Francisco5 people · 3 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 8The End of Ego-Depletion Theory?5 people · 2 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 9Mega-Tunnels Dug by South American Megafauna4 people · 361 points · first shared 2017 · 71 comments on HN
- 10People of class drink alcohol4 people · 89 points · first shared 2010 · 60 comments on HN
- 11Possible earthlike planet found in the Goldilocks zone of a nearby star4 people · 72 points · first shared 2010 · 4 comments on HN
- 12The Cult of Genius4 people · 43 points · first shared 2009 · 17 comments on HN
- 13Linux Versus E. coli4 people · 37 points · first shared 2010 · 1 comments on HN
- 14The 50th anniversary of Starfish Prime: the nuke that shook the world (2012)4 people · 8 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 15Split Brain, Undivided Consciousness? (2017)4 people · 8 points · first shared 2017 · 2 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
joshvm · 2019-09-25
The images are great. The first one with the salvagers surrounded by butterflies is surreal
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/files/2018/06/NYC37701.jpg
And the photo of the guy taking a walk in his village next to a crashed Soyuz looks straight out of a post apocalypse RPG.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/files/2018/06/NYC37703.jpg
mirkonasato · 2019-08-17
A quick search on "communication range" returns as first result a post [1] calling it a myth.
"Hollingworth was writing specifically about leadership, and in childen, but Towers extrapolates the point to claim that any kind of ‘genuine’ communication is impossible across a 30 IQ point gap"
[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2017/08/31/myth-30-iq-c…
ChrisCinelli · 2019-08-03
When I was in elementary school I was told about Miller's experiment:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/03/21/scientis… but nothing has ever filled the gap between his results and how a bacteria could be generated.
This is one explanation of what could have happened: http://evolutionfaq.com/articles/probability-life
Is there any more supporting evidence that life really started that way?
undersuit · 2019-06-11
Parisitic wasps are some of my favorite insects to learn about as long as they aren't doing any mind control tricks on their hosts.
My favorite is the Megaphragma mymaripenne[1], the adults are said to have reduced the size of 95% of their neuron cells by getting rid of the nucleus.
[1]http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/11/30/how-fair…
thaumasiotes · 2018-12-09
Here is "love" data for college students. Take particular note of the summary:
> First, Asian guys are screwed, obviously.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2008/07/why-does-race-matter-fo…
Asians as a group have more economic success and security than whites do. But they're right to complain about love. Economic success doesn't mean much by itself, unless your idea of the good life is to sit in the dark muttering over your big pile of gold.
mkl · 2018-09-15
Agriculture can support higher population density. If you've got mouths to feed, you do the hard work. There is a hypothesis that the cold Younger Dryas period around 12,000 years ago pushed people in the fertile crescent into cereal cultivation, since the colder temperatures meant less available food for hunter-gatherer populations that had grown during the warmer period preceding it.
The first farmers were significantly less healthy than the hunter-gatherers they followed [1].
[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/06/17/early-farmers-wer…
kldavis4 · 2018-03-17
Actually, I _am_ referring to 'many worlds' (at least according to the technical explanation in this article: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/26/are-many-w… and not a multiverse. And yes, there is some hope that there will be some testable empirical evidence at some point, but if in the end it turns out that there are not 'many worlds', then I don't see that big a difference. I'd love it if there were parallel dimensions but it is fantasy at this point.
moyix · 2017-11-25
FYI, Bargh (the author of this editorial) has been pushing these sorts of priming effects for a long time. Many of these (most famously the "priming people with elderly-related words makes them walk slower" study) have not held up under subsequent replications.
Clearly this doesn't mean that the studies Bargh is describing here are similarly flawed – but he has shown a strong resistance to admitting his mistakes, and so I'm less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt here, particularly when the original studies aren't linked anywhere.
Further reading:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/01/18/primed-b…
http://andrewgelman.com/2016/02/12/priming-effects-replicate-just-fine…
http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-here-is-the-…
nopinsight · 2017-10-28
Overexcitability is a known concept in the gifted education community but it does not usually imply disorders.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overexcitability
A critical analysis of the research used in the article is worth reading: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2017/10/22/intelligence…
rpeden · 2017-06-30
There was a great Bad Astronomy post a few years back on the 50th anniversary of Starfish Prime:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/07/09/the-50th-ann…
jansho · 2017-03-24
Your comment reminds me of a scene in "The Great Beauty" where the little girl expresses her tantrum with buckets of paint hurled on a very large canvas. The grown-ups stood back, fascinated, it was kinda obscene.
Here's an interesting article that addresses your question (well, partially):
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/03/14/a-child-…
nkoren · 2016-08-25
Maybe much easier...
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/fire-in-the-mind/2013/02/25/oliver-s…
...or maybe not.
eplanit · 2016-05-05
Along with how automation and robots will affect other aspects of our lives, one can wonder how it will be involved in our moral and physical perspectives on sex. To the point, for moral and health reasons, will people be drawn increasingly to robot sex?[1][2] (links maybe NSFW)
[1] http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/robot-sex-may-be-coming-soone…
[2] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/lovesick-cyborg/2016/03/10/women-men…
nether · 2016-05-01
Why is a comparison to the cosmetics industry meaningful?
Any way, it boils down to the fact that Americans thinks NASA gets far more money than it actually does. In 2007 polling found that the on average Americans thought NASA received one fourth of the federal budget; the actual proportion was 0.58% http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2007/11/21/nasas-budget… This works out to a few bucks per year per person. It's amazing what NASA does with so little.
0xcde4c3db · 2016-03-27
> The evidence for physical activity being good for just about every ailment under the sun is about as incontrovertible as the evidence for water being wet.
No, it isn't, but people really, really like to think that it is [1]. Like most other interventions worth talking about, there are situations it improves, situations where it doesn't change much, and situations it worsens (those "consult your physician before starting an exercise program" disclaimers aren't just for show).
[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2010/11/30/exercise-and…
abakker · 2016-01-12
I would guess that the word Delicate isn't really the case, more "fine tuned". They say the volcanos are about a mile deep, so based on this calculator - http://www.calctool.org/CALC/other/games/depth_press , thats about 2360PSI. I am not a physicist, but it seems that if that pressure were to decrease because of a greater pull on the water from the Sun, then it would be less able to "contain" the magma underneath. unfortunately, I don't know what the actual deviation in pressure down there might be with the fluctuations of the earth's tides.
This also reminds me of this - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2014/10/01/antarctic-ice-mel…
If the icecaps melt, and the water migrates into the oceans, then the pressure on the seafloor increases by some amount, which might further decrease seafloor volcanism?
Menge · 2015-03-24
The reference to the warm/cold beverage study reminded me that in the last few years there have been experiments demonstrating that many of these priming studies got their desired results by failing to double blind.
I don't see an article on the flaws in that study in a quick search, but here is a similar one:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/01/18/primed-b…
colanderman · 2014-10-28
Thinking about the entropic explanation of the arrow of time in conjunction with the anthropic principle led me to this fantastic FAQ: http://preposterousuniverse.com/eternitytohere/faq.html and the idea of Boltzmann Brains: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/08/01/boltzmanns…
hyperpape · 2014-09-11
This is not accurate, to the best of my knowledge. I've consistently read roughly 20% European ancestry as the average for African-Americans. One source: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/genetic-variation-among…
Of course, in general, legal racial categories may not map to anything genetic.
a_bonobo · 2014-04-28
I'd like to see the citation on that (there are no GM tomatoes on the market), I'd also like to add that the 'watery', huge, flavour-poor tomatoes you often get in Europe have been created by traditional non-GM breeding: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/06/28/why-supe…
There have been efforts to create GM-tomatoes with better taste, here's one example from 2007: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gm-tomato-tastes-better/
noiv · 2013-01-08
Why there are so many constraints on life listed? Is it to make more us special? Some people follow a different approach and say the purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/03/10/free-energ…
I very much like the idea that life might be a consequence of entropy and emerges everywhere where energy is in flux and matter poses a threshold against the arrow of time.
nacker · 2012-09-30
I don't know you, and I can't comment on Colombia, as I have never experienced it. Of course, I can enjoy life without that possibly hazardous trip. I'm only suggesting to you that there are non-governmentally approved,very worthwhile, and perfectly healthy experiences that you are missing out on, as I have chosen to pass on Colombia.
Each to his own. I enjoy your posts enormously. Maybe some day you will have a change of heart and post about a life changing mushroom trip one day. Stay loose!
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/10/03/drug-in-magic-mus…
mkr-hn · 2012-07-04
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/07/04/higgs/
This is a great comment:
"Think about it this way. Let’s say you’re at the target range, and the Lone Ranger is shooting at clay pidgins right nearby. Obviously you’ll want to know if he’s shooting silver bullets, right? But you can’t look at them while they’re still tied up in the gun. You can’t look at them after they’ve hit the pidgin. And they’re traveling too fast to study while they’re in flight. The only way you can see if they’re silver bullets is based on how the pidgin gets blown to pieces."
"The Higgs boson has a very short lifetime outside of other subatomic particles. The only way for us to study them is to smash those particles together and see the results of the decay. Based on how the Higgs decays (blows itself to pieces), we can infer its existence."
eevilspock · 2012-05-06
I disagree. It is a useful perspective because it flies in the face of one's intuited perspective. How many of us would have estimated that the volume of water would be so small? We visualize the oceans as really deep gouges on the Earth's surface because to our puny asses a depth of 1 to 8 miles sounds amazingly deep. We'd never guess that even with miles deep depressions and miles high mountains, the Earth is smoother than a billiard ball:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/08/ten-things-y…
Combining both of these counter-intuitive perspectives tells us that our oceans are akin to a very thin film of water on a wet billiard ball. A thin dirty film is all that billions of bacteria needs to thrive on a billiard ball, and a thin dirty film is all that billions of animals and plants need to thrive on Earth.
ORioN63 · 2012-04-06
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/04/04/to-grasp-a-b…
Above, is a link of Phil Plait, explaining a feature on that same image: A star-forming region denominated G305.
The read is worth the time!
JonnieCache · 2011-11-17
For a writeup of this that includes some gasp! physics, see the excellent Résonaances blog http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2011/11/lhcb-has-evidence-of-new-physi…
For something slightly more comprehensible than that, but a lot more useful than bloody wired, try Sean Carroll: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/11/14/new-physic…
For more LHC/higgs gossip see this recent article from Not Even Wrong http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4136
bugsy · 2011-07-24
Thanks for digging that up, that is a good source. Combined with spindrift's reference he dug up from 2010 (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/verbal-vs-mathematical-… they show a much fuller and more accurate picture than I portrayed. Philosophy students are the best at verbal and writing on the GRE, but are only at the top of the humanities in math ranking, and are below the levels of STEM subject applicants.
nollidge · 2011-05-13
Excellent science blogs:
Bad Astronomy: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy
Frontal Cortex (neuropsych type stuff): http://www.wired.com/wiredscience
Not Exactly Rocket Science (general science, mostly biology): http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience
GvS · 2011-04-10
Here is followup:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/04/07/followup-on-…
dwc · 2011-03-05
It's worth reading Phil Plait's article on this: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/03/05/has-life-bee…