Oysters once abounded in the estuaries along the eastern coast of the U.S. But overharvesting, pollution and disease have taken a devastating toll on a keystone species. Of the live eastern oyster reefs that existed in Georgia in 1889, for example, only 8 percent remain. Now archaeologists have found that the ancient harvesting practices of […]
When the United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced in 2014 that it would send a mission to Mars by the country’s 50th birthday in December 2021, it looked like a bet with astronomically tough odds. At the time, the nation had no space agency and no planetary scientists, and had only recently launched its first satellite. […]
For immigrants, a medical appointment is never just another routine errand. Instead, it is a challenge, a test of strength, one that provokes anxiety at every step. Will the receptionist understand my accent, or flash a toothy, disingenuous smile while asking me to repeat myself for the third time? Will the doctor ask my own […]
Peer closely enough, and everything begins to look granular. Trees are made largely of quarks. Sunbeams are swarms of photons. Phones run on streams of electrons. Physicists have detected particles of matter, light, and most forces—but no experiment has yet unveiled gravity’s grainy side. Many physicists assume that gravity must come in particles but that […]
For three months, the COVID-19 pandemic did what nobody imagined possible: shut down the city that never sleeps. Businesses boarded up, public transport screeched to halt, and Times Square was quiet. Those weeks were emotionally and financially painful. But the drastic measures worked. New York was the epicenter of the pandemic. Cases peaked at almost […]
In 2012, I had my first psychedelic experiences, as a subject in a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit. I was given two doses of psilocybin spaced a month apart to treat my cancer-related depression. During one session, deep within the world the drug evoked, I found myself […]
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Like many birds, male white-throated sparrows belt out songs to defend their territories and attract mates. And until the year 2000, one particular song stood out as the most popular white-throat tune in forests across Canada. (Clip: triplet song) “The end part of the song is a three-syllable repeat. That’s supposed to sound like ‘oh […]
Growing up in the world of academia, it was impossible to miss the issue of representation in my field. I just had to look around at the faces walking the halls of the elite institutions I was lucky to inhabit. I worked as an undergrad in Yale’s psychology department, where one out of 31 current […]
The discovery of a lost plant species highlights the need to protect other endangered species in one of the most biodiverse regions in the United States — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com Source link