Discover Magazine

blogs.discovermagazine.com — Last month we mentioned a paper on the arxiv that made a provocative claim: evidence from the dynamics of stars above the galactic disk indicates that there is essentially no dark matter in the vicinity of the Sun.

blogs.discovermagazine.com — In 1893, the Norwegian zoologist Fridtjof Nansen set off to find the North Pole. He would not use pack dogs to cross the Arctic Ice. Instead, he locked his fate into the ice itself. He sailed his ship The Fram directly into the congealing autumn Arctic, until it became locked in the frozen sea.

blogs.discovermagazine.com — "The aim of this study was to look at changes in seasonal heat tolerance due to acclimatization produced by different types of clothing. A group of 12 female adults served as subjects in the study which lasted for 3 months from April to June during which the ambient temperature gradually rose.

discovermagazine.com — A human brain overrun with cysts from Taenia solium, a tapeworm that normally inhabits the muscles of pigs. Courtesy of Theodore E. Nash , M.D. Theodore Nash sees only a few dozen patients a year in his clinic at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

blogs.discovermagazine.com — "In our busy lives, almost all of us have to walk with a cup of coffee. While often we spill the drink, this familiar phenomenon has never been explored systematically.

blogs.discovermagazine.com — I've posted a lot of stuff about Sunday's annular eclipse (see Related Links below), and I figured I was done... but then I got a pretty remarkable picture sent to me. During the eclipse, in northern California, two men sent a small (6 cubic meter) helium-filled balloon up to 90,000 feet (roughly 27 km).

blogs.discovermagazine.com — Via my pal Miss Cellania (possibly not her real name) at Neatorama, I saw this short cat video which is really pretty funny: Ha! This is a great example of audio pareidolia; hearing (instead of seeing, as it's usually done) some recognizable pattern in a completely unrelated series of noises.

blogs.discovermagazine.com — To my surprise there is apparently a move on the part of the Republicans in the House of Representatives to curtail funding for The American Community Survey. I am not too excited by the idea that you could get fined for not filling out a government survey form, but neither do I think that abolishing social statistics is the correct solution to this problem.

blogs.discovermagazine.com — For genetic genealogy buffs, I highly recommend Gedmatch. It's been rolling out a lot of new features, including ancestry inference tools from the major genome bloggers. Here is my "chromosome paining" using Zack Ajmal's reference populations:

blogs.discovermagazine.com — The American Psychiatric Association have just published the latest update of the draft DSM-5 psychiatric diagnosis manual, which is due to be completed in 2013. The changes have provoked much comment, criticism, and heated debate, and many have used the opportunity to attack psychiatric diagnosis and the perceived failure to find "biological tests" to replace descriptions of mental phenomena.

blogs.discovermagazine.com — By , came out in 2010. Find him on Twitter at David H. Freedman, a journalist who's contributed to many magazines, including DISCOVER, where he writes the Impatient Futurist column. His latest book, @dhfreedman. Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us-and How to Know When Not to Trust Them Computer glasses have arrived, or are about to.

blogs.discovermagazine.com — The American Psychiatric Association have just published the latest update of the draft DSM-5 psychiatric diagnosis manual, which is due to be completed in 2013. The changes have provoked much comment, criticism, and heated debate, and many have used the opportunity to attack psychiatric diagnosis and the perceived failure to find "biological tests" to replace descriptions of mental phenomena.

blogs.discovermagazine.com — The web has been buzzing over what everyone is calling the smallest extrasolar planet found, weighing in at about 5 times the mass of the Earth. Problem is, that's not the smallest exoplanet found, not by a long shot. That record is still held by three planets massing 0.02, 3.9, and 4.3 times the Earth's mass, orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12.

blogs.discovermagazine.com — First: CONGRATS to SpaceX for the successful launch of the Falcon 9 and deployment of the Dragon capsule! Everything looked great and things are apparently going smoothly. You can watch the whole thing here, and I'll have more about all this in a little while. Until then, back to your regularly scheduled blog post.]

blogs.discovermagazine.com — A blind man sees his fiancée's smile for the first time. Another walks around at night, navigating via streetlamps and headlights. Yet another reads his own name (and spots a typo). All three had lost their sight years before, as an inherited disorder destroyed the light-sensing cells of their retinas.

blogs.discovermagazine.com — A blind man sees his fiancée's smile for the first time. Another walks around at night, navigating via streetlamps and headlights. Yet another reads his own name (and spots a typo). All three had lost their sight years before, as an inherited disorder destroyed the light-sensing cells of their retinas.

blogs.discovermagazine.com — The price of university textbooks (not to mention scholarly journals) is like the weather: everyone complains about it, but nobody does anything about it. My own graduate textbook in GR hovers around $100, but I'd be happier if it were half that price or less.

blogs.discovermagazine.com — Flares have been washing up on beaches for a long time: an AP news item from February 23, 1993 Last week, several small stones in the pocket of a California woman's shorts exploded into flame, leaving her with third-degree burns.

blogs.discovermagazine.com — Astronomy | annular eclipse | [zenphotopress album=361 sort=sort_order number=20]

discovermagazine.com — A human brain overrun with cysts from Taenia solium, a tapeworm that normally inhabits the muscles of pigs. Courtesy of Theodore E. Nash , M.D. Theodore Nash sees only a few dozen patients a year in his clinic at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.