Discover的April 2017目录

Night Lights I enjoyed reading “Let There Be Dark” (Prognosis, December 2016) and am cleaning up my act regarding light while sleeping. There are 13 full moons a year giving light bright enough to definitely say the night is not dark. Cave-dwelling came upon the scene rather late, and even then I’m assuming a fire was kept burning for a lot of that time. I’m wondering why humans still seem to be so sensitive to light at night? I’m interested, but I promise not to lose any sleep over it. Gary Keith, Arroyo Grande, CA When Birds of a Feather Snooze Together No. 43 of your top stories (January/ February 2017) talks about birds sleeping during flights. We live in the Catskill Mountains of New York state. Some years ago…

THOUGH IT MIGHT TEMPT YOU to break out into a Mary Poppins song, superhydrophobic has nothing to do with dancing penguins or carousels come to life. The term refers to a material’s ability to repel water. When water droplets hit surfaces with this property, they don’t flatten like they normally would — they bead up, often contacting the surface at angles exceeding 150 degrees, and roll off. You can see this phenomenon in nature when water falls onto a lotus leaf. Outside of nature, researchers are applying superhydrophobic coatings to the interiors of food containers, like bottles of honey and soda cans, to get out every last drop and cut down on food waste.…

MODERN DEATH How Medicine Changed the End of Life By Haider Warraich EXTREME MEASURES Finding a Better Path to the End of Life By Jessica Nutik Zitter Two physicians, each gifted, thoughtful observers, tackle a subject that’s rarely discussed ahead of the event: death. Zitter, whose work in an Oakland ICU was the subject of the recent Netflix documentary Extremis, has a deft directness. She presents multiple perspectives — the anxious family, a confused patient, clashing opinions between health care professionals and her own internal conflicts — in spare, riveting prose. Warraich, a cardiology fellow at Duke University, leans more toward the poetic. Both writers, however, look tough end-of-life issues right in the eye and, with intelligence and sensitivity, invite their readers to do the same.…

Control. Most of us like to feel we have some semblance of it in our daily lives. And we tend to get a little edgy when it looks like it’s slipping away. It’s why the thought of self-driving cars mixing it up with human drivers on the roads makes us pause. Certainly our brains’ inherent predictive powers supersede what’s been programmed into a car’s computer, right? That factor — prediction — is a key objective for the artificial intelligence research team featured in our cover story. For all the stories we’ve read and heard about machines that are geared up to drive, grocery shop and pick up our kids for us, AI is still in its infancy. Researchers are working hard just to get AI into the throes of toddlerhood.…

Tornado Outbreaks on the Rise Just one twister can cause devastation. But when outbreaks bring dozens of tornadoes over days, they can leave a path of death and destruction across vast regions. And new research shows tornado outbreaks are getting more dangerous: More tornadoes are hitting during each round, even though the overall annual number of American twisters hasn’t changed. Scientists aren’t sure yet if there’s a climate change connection, or whether things will continue to get worse. Building Blocks BAT TALK It turns out that bats have one-on-one chats, a behavior previously observed in just a few creatures such as primates and dolphins. Tel Aviv University researchers studied 15,000 Egyptian fruit bat calls over 75 days and pinpointed specific vocalizations in the cacophony for the first time. Learning the…

YURI MILNER was pretty much destined to do something in science. Born in Moscow in November 1961, he was named after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who, about six months earlier, had become the first person to venture into outer space. Inspired by Carl Sagan and others, Milner majored in physics at Moscow State University. Then, in the middle of earning a Ph.D. in particle physics, he quit. Eventually, he started his own internet company and invested in other companies like Facebook, quickly amassing a fortune. Since then, Milner has used his wealth to support science. He co-founded the Breakthrough Prize, which recognizes important advancements in physics, life sciences and math by awarding $3 million prizes in each category. Milner spoke by phone with Discover contributing editor Steve Nadis days before…

A BIG BANG IN A LITTLE ROOM The Quest to Create New Universes By Zeeya Merali Frequent Discover contributor Merali blends physics with philosophy on a journey to learn whether humans will soon be able to make entirely new universes (spoiler alert: quite possibly, yes) and, if so, whether our universe could be the science project of other intelligent life. THE INKBLOTS Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test and the Power of Seeing By Damion Searls Searls provides a detailed recounting of a man whose creativity and curiosity about the human mind drove him to create a new way of “reading” people — an innovation that was quickly embraced, and misunderstood, by the masses. WILD NIGHTS How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World By Benjamin Reiss Get a solid eight hours…

Nestled among Seattle’s gleaming lights on a gloomy September day, a single nonprofit wants to change the world, one computer at a time. Its researchers hope to transform the way machines perceive the world: to have them not only see it, but understand what they’re seeing. At the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), researchers are working on just that. AI2, founded in 2014 by Microsoft visionary Paul Allen, is the nation’s largest nonprofit AI research institute. Its campus juts into the northern arm of Lake Union, sharing the waterfront with warehouses and crowded marinas. Across the lake, dozens of cranes rise above the Seattle skyline — visual reminders of the city’s ongoing tech boom. At AI2, unshackled by profit-obsessed boardrooms, the mandate from its CEO Oren Etzioni is simple:…

About twice each century, a star in our galaxy explodes in a supernova. Only a few of those explosions happen close enough to Earth to be visible with the naked eye. By comparing ancient observations with today’s spacecraft data on supernova remains, scientists hope to nail down when those stars exploded. Here’s a look at eight supernovas that caught earthlings’ attention throughout history. A.D. 185 RCW 86 Chinese and possibly Roman astronomers recorded a strange new star in the skies. A.D. 393 G347.3-0.5 Chinese observers reported a so-called “guest star” that shone for months, appearing as bright as Jupiter. A.D. 1006 SN1006 This stellar explosion surpassed Venus in brightness and captivated skywatchers worldwide. 1054 Crab Nebula The supernova responsible for the famous Crab Nebula lit up even daytime skies, possibly…

STELLAR NURSERY This colorful vista reveals glowing clouds full of budding stars near our galaxy’s center. But neither the human eye nor ground-based telescopes can see this spectacular sight, which is obscured by cosmic dust. NASA’s space-based Spitzer and WISE telescopes, though, view the heavens in infrared light, which can punch through the dust. Judy Schmidt, an expert in processing spacecraft images, combined photos from both telescopes to reveal this complex region centered on the Milky Way’s invisible supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A*.…

Astronomers have been finding exoplanets out in the cosmos for 25 years, and if we’ve learned anything about all those planets, it’s that a lot of different, weird kinds exist. They are big and hot and close to their stars. They are smaller than Earth. They are gassy and Jupiter-y. They are rocky and terrestrial. They are so cold even the most extreme earthly organisms would freeze to death. They are so hot they could melt glass. They rain glass. They are by themselves. They have neighbors. They are far away. They are right next door. And over the years, astronomers have found more and more planets that are increasingly “like” Earth — at least in terms of their size, their distance from their stars, and potentially their compositions and…

1 Rain reigns over us: It’s the main way liquid water, necessary for all earthly life-forms, disperses across the planet. 2 But a 2015 study in Nature Geoscience concluded Earth’s early rain was made of iron. More than 4.5 billion years ago, bits of space rock vaporized upon impact with our still-forming planet, rose up in plumes of rock and iron, and then fell back down as rain. 3 Water-based rain dates back to at least the late Archaean Eon: Researchers have found fossilized raindrop imprints in 2.7 billion-year-old volcanic tuff in South Africa. 4 Acid rain, while still water, leaves a different kind of imprint on many surfaces, corroding metal and eroding limestone and marble. The term, coined in the mid-19th century, typically refers to precipitation with a pH…