Discover September 2013

Don’t be shy about sharing your opinions, whether via letters, email or our social media communities. Here’s what you’ve been telling us lately. Shark Hunt Hatred Erik Vance wrote about the declining shark population in our June cover story. I read your great article, “Desperately Seeking Sharks.” I’m 17 years old. I want to do marine conservation biology. I already know about shark-finning, but after reading your article I was upset at how fast the shark population is declining. Tonight (6/5/13) on CNN on Piers Morgan Live, I was horrified to see him glorifying the capture and killing of a mako shark for sport. I hope your article will raise awareness of the decreasing population of sharks and help to save the species. Saoirse Keely-Zinkel Madison, WI Counting Off July/August’s…

Here at DISCOVER, we see change as a big part of our job. Over the past few months, the team here has introduced a variety of tweaks to the magazine and website. But this issue heralds a bit of an upgrade, with a new look and new elements that we’re eager to share with our readers. Whenever a magazine undergoes a redesign, this is the spot where the editor starts justifying the revamp, perhaps with a reference to Darwin, or by making use of a handy pop-culture reference — comparing the change to, say, the regeneration of the Doctor from Britain’s popular Doctor Who TV series. Same character you know and love, just a new look and some added personality traits! I would never do that, of course. Instead, I…

Stars cook up nearly all of the approximately 60 atomic elements in people’s bodies. But exactly how that works remains a mystery. Astrophysicists have developed cutting-edge computer simulations (shown at right) to grapple with an array of related puzzles: • What were stars like when they first appeared in the universe over 13 billion years ago, starting the process of modern element production? • What do we know about the nature of the death of massive stars — signaled by Type II supernovae — that fashion crucial elements such as calcium and oxygen? • How might the burned-out stars called white dwarfs be brought to ruin by other stars in so-called Type la supernovae, inciting the fiery alchemy that yielded much of the iron in our blood and the potassium…

Downtown Tucson and the Santa Catalina Mountains loom in the distance in this October 2000 photo showing an excavation at Julian Wash in Arizona. Once dismissed as a probable trash heap, the site is now recognized as a large Hohokam village from about A.D. 750 to 1150, and it is a shining example of preservation archaeology, in which sites are excavated and preserved in concert with development. After Arizona made plans to rebuild an interstate exchange at the Julian Wash site, archaeologists and the state established a two-stage preservation plan. Researchers first excavated a strip of land that held hundreds of dwellings as well as other artifacts, according to William Doelle of Desert Archaeology Inc. The interstate was subsequently built over these parcels, and nearly 17 additional acres near the…

Two of DiscoVer’s bloggers answer our first round of questions. Q Why don’t we know when we’re dreaming, especially when we interact with dead characters? My dad died a long time ago, yet when he inhabits my dreams, it seems perfectly normal. Do we all become morons when dreaming? —Alan Schertzer A This is a very good question. The dreaming brain’s activity is largely similar to that found when awake, but some areas of the brain are less active in dreams. In particular, activity in a region called the precuneus is lower — and this area has been linked to conscious experience. In one study, activity in the precuneus was higher during lucid dreams (in which you are aware of being asleep) than normal dreams. So the precuneus, and perhaps…

Since the late 1970s, more than 400 people of all ages in remote areas of China’s southwestern Yunnan province have dropped dead — sometimes in midsentence — from a mysterious cause, mostly during the summer. The so-called sudden unexplained deaths (SUDs) seemed to be the result of heart attacks, but no one was sure what was prompting them as only half of the autopsies revealed underlying heart disease. In 2010, Chinese health officials warned that, based on preliminary tests of the victims, the culprit was a dangerously high level of barium in a local edible mushroom, Trogia venenata. The little white mushroom isn’t valuable, but exports of other fungi, including matsutake and porcinis, are a major source of income for Yunnan’s native people; fears of barium poisoning could hurt the…