DiscoverJuly/August 2025的目錄

IN THE 1920S and ’30s, a British botanist named Arthur Ernest Watkins compiled the world’s most comprehensive collection of local wheats. Concerned that technical advancements in breeding would decrease crop diversity, he had set out to collect landraces, local varieties of wheat from around the world. Of the over 1,000 landrace samples that Watkins collected, 827 have survived to this day, having been replanted and reharvested at least every five years to ensure viability. In a paper published in Nature in June 2024, scientists proposed that this seed collection could fortify modern wheat agriculture. Identifying genes within the collection that could increase modern wheat’s resistance to pests and diseases, the research could help farmers feed the world’s ever-increasing population. THE “GREEN REVOLUTION” of the mid-1900s brought about a dramatic increase…

LIFE AS AN ancient Egyptian scribe took its toll on the body. That’s what a team of researchers has revealed, anyway, after analyzing these workers’ remains and finding them riddled with arthritis and other work-related wear and tear. The remains came from 69 individuals, 30 of whom were identified as scribes, who were buried in the Abusir necropolis in Egypt over 4,000 years ago, between 2700 and 2180 B.C.E. According to the researchers, traces of degenerative damage were found throughout the scribes’ ankles, knees, pelvises, shoulders, and spines, all of which can be attributed to their work. Published in Scientific Reports in 2024, the researchers’ results are the first to assess the physical toll of these scribes’ profession, showing that poor work posture is more than a modern problem. EGYPTIAN…

In early 2020, Wynde Dyer walked into the house that would transform her life. The Central California ranch sat on a cul-de-sac of gated homes and glittering aquamarine pools. It boasted private tennis and beach volleyball courts, a horse run, floor-to-ceiling windows, and a manicured lawn. The immaculate exterior masked what lay inside. The owners of the house, wealthy pistachio farmers, had a hoarding problem., For decades, they’d accumulated mountains of items. Then they vacated, leaving it virtually untouched for six years. Dyer had accepted a job as their personal organizer. When she arrived, she faced rat droppings, moldy carpets, a garage full of agricultural chemicals and animal-care products, decades-old toiletries and makeup, endless boxes of scented candles, rotting wood and cardboard — and an unidentifiable animal carcass. Dyer was…

A secret is an odd thing. You can’t see or touch it, and it doesn’t take up space in the physical world. Yet you can carry it around for years, decades even, until it “weighs you down” so palpably that you need to “get it off your chest.” Pretty heavy words for the intangible contents of your mind. Michael Slepian, an associate professor at Columbia Business School and one of the world’s leading experts on secrecy, was first drawn to the subject through these metaphors. Were they mere figures of speech, he wondered, or do the things we hide truly feel like a sack of rocks, a tangible burden? To better understand secrecy’s toll, Slepian asked two groups of people to think about a personal secret (big in one case,…

GALAXIES ARE where the action is in the cosmos. Stars, planets, and black holes are all bunched inside these bustling cosmic centers. But space isn’t just galaxies. In between galaxies are vast expanses of intergalactic space. But where does a galaxy end and interstellar space begin? There seem to be several plausible ways astronomers might define the edge of a galaxy — perhaps where concentrations of gas and dust drop below a certain threshold or where a galaxy’s gravitational influence fades. “The short answer is that the boundary of a galaxy has been traditionally defined using fixed levels of brightness,” says Nushkia Chamba, a researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Essentially, once the light from a galaxy is faint enough, the galaxy is said to end. But Chamba has spearheaded…

THE QUOKKA, an adorable marsupial hailing from southwestern Australia, is bound to put a smile on anyone’s face. They’re small and fuzzy, and the distinctive shape of their mouth gives quokkas the appearance of an ever-present grin. Despite their limited geographical range, these herbivorous marsupials have captured the hearts of millions around the world — the viral #quokkaselfie trend on social media features thousands of selfies taken with quokkas. Yet the quokka population is rapidly declining, and their lives remain shrouded in mystery. Here’s what you need to know about the critters known as the “happiest animal on Earth.” ROTTNEST ISLAND, a popular tourist destination off the coast of Perth in western Australia, is home to the majority of the quokka population today, with an estimated 10,000 individuals. The island…

LANGUAGES ARE a lot like living organisms. Both evolve over time, allowing an ancestral tongue like Latin to sire diverse descendants — Spanish, French, Romanian — that are more closely related to each other than to, say, Korean. This much is old news; Charles Darwin himself noted the resemblance. “The formation of different languages and of distinct species,” he writes in The Descent of Man, “are curiously parallel.” Now, new research in Nature Ecology & Evolution shows that the analogy runs deeper. Islands, long recognized as drivers of biological diversity, are just as much engines of linguistic diversity. Drawing on a global database of languages from more than 13,000 inhabited islands (with a maximum size cutoff at around 4,250 square miles), the 2024 study shows that some of the same…

If you’ve ever let a bunch of bananas on your counter go overripe, you’ve likely played host to a cloud of fruit flies. They were almost certainly unwelcome houseguests, but this same species of fly could save your life one day. Fruit flies in a kitchen are a nuisance, but in a laboratory, they’ve proven themselves time and again to be crucial for bio-medical breakthroughs. The idea that a tiny insect has anything in common with a human might seem strange, but for more than a century, the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, has yielded precious information about how our bodies work. In labs all around the world, fruit flies are the key to scientists learning how diseases are passed down through our genes, how cancer cells proliferate, and even…

WHEN BEN ALESSIO visited the Birch Aquarium in San Diego, he found an unexpected clue to an age-old biological question: How do animals get their spots and stripes? On one level the answer is simple; it’s easy to see how such markings could have evolved as camouflage, warning signals, or as a way to attract mates. But evolutionary explanations don’t get at the deeper problem: How, in a mechanistic sense, do these patterns develop in individual animals? Because at face value, the formation of such patterns doesn’t appear to make much sense. When colors interact, we typically expect them to diffuse until they reach a bland equilibrium. Pour milk into your coffee, and you don’t get interesting patches of brown, tan, and white like a leopard’s coat. Unless you’ve got…

Salamanders Make the Most of Square Feet With their uniquely square-shaped toes, wandering salamanders (Aneides vagrans) are masters of movement, perfectly adapted for climbing, jumping, and gliding through the towering coastal forests of California and British Columbia. A study led by a Washington State University researcher recently uncovered the secret behind their remarkable agility: These salamanders can control the flow of blood through the veins in their vascularized toe tips (seen here through their speckled, translucent skin), allowing them to expand and contract their toes’ surface area. This mechanism enhances their grip, helping them attach and detach from the uneven surfaces of trees. Reported in the Journal of Morphology in January 2025, the findings could inspire innovations in fields like prosthetics and robotics.…

SOLITUDE SHOULD be simple enough to understand. It’s “the state or condition of being alone,” explains Thuy-vy Nguyen, a psychology professor at Durham University in the U.K. But time alone might be voluntary or involuntary — it might be pleasant or unpleasant — all depending on the context. Nguyen is the principal investigator of the Solitude Lab, where she and her team work to unravel how solitude shapes our internal experiences. They’ve found that solitude provides “emotional regulation” by tamping down high-arousal emotions like excitement and anger. They’ve also found that being alone fosters “a sense of autonomy by allowing individuals to engage with their environment in a manner and at a pace that suits them best,” she says. But how do people harness these benefits, without feeling the loneliness…

FOR CENTURIES, people have noticed that when the sky darkens during a solar eclipse, some animals behave strangely. Records from the 16th century mention birds ceasing to sing and even falling to the ground during eclipses. But until recently, scientific studies that provided quantitative information about how eclipses affect animals were few and far between. The total solar eclipses that crossed North America in August 2017 and April 2024 gave biologists a rare chance to examine how eclipses affect animal behavior. On average, a total solar eclipse happens somewhere on Earth every 18 months, but a given spot on the globe will be in a total eclipse’s path just a few times in a millennium. The proximity of the 2017 and 2024 eclipses, in time and in place, was a…

Jorge was a 37-year-old dockyard worker who was admitted to my hospital for abdominal pain and jaundice. When I first met him, he was sitting up in his hospital bed reading a book, but it was hard not to notice the yellow color to his skin and his eyes — classic signs of jaundice. His wife sat at his bedside in a chair. A recent immigrant from Central America, Jorge told me that he had experienced several months of vague mid-abdominal pains, but they typically came and went. He mostly ignored these pains or took over-the-counter pain meds on particularly bad days. “I work 12 hour days, six days a week starting at 5 a.m. in a very physical job, so there is not a lot of time to stay…

Things are always going up your nose. It could be a single bacterium wafting through the air, or the protein-spiked sphere of a rhinovirus. It could be a clump of pollen. That clump or spiked sphere or bacterium, during its brief adventure in the nasal passage, careens between hairs and currents of air and lands, not on the body’s cells but on the layer of mucus covering those cells, and there the thing sits, trapped in slime. Depending on the physical and chemical nature of that foreign body, a number of events might occur upon arrival. The object might be permitted to penetrate the mucosal layer and reach the body’s cells below, or it might be encased in thicker varieties of mucus while elements of the immune system mobilize to…

Nature is full of visual surprises, but few have been as mysterious as the zebra’s striking black-and-white stripes. In their savannah habitat, they stick out like a sore thumb. But just why have these equine enigmas made such a fashion statement with their fur? Martin How, a senior research fellow at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol in the U.K., believes that avoidance of parasites, which carry deadly pathogens like trypanosomes, or sleeping sickness, is the most well-supported explanation. “They have reasonably thin skin, whereas something like a wildebeest has much thicker skin,” says How, who has studied how zebra patterns deter biting flies from landing. “They8220;So the zebras are particularly vulnerable to biting flies [and] the diseases they carry.” In a 2023 study published in…