Discover, August 1, 1993

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The star on the star-nosed mole may look freakish and useless, but in fact it gives the animal the ability to sense electric fields.

For the most part, the star-nosed mole looks normal enough. Stocky and dark and about six inches long, it has a body like that of a garden-variety mole and the same powerful digging hands and poorly developed eyes. But then there is the matter of its nose. Clustered around its nostrils, like petals on a nightmarish flower, are 22 writhing, probing, fleshy tentacles.

Continue reading “The Electric Mole” →

Discover, August 1, 1993

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Doctors are rediscovering a disgusting but true bit of folk wisdom: maggots make a great cure for infected wounds.

Grady Dugas, a physician in Marion, Louisiana, was at a loss. His patient, a bedridden 80-year-old man, had developed terrible bedsores, some of them an inch deep, on his heels, hips, and buttocks. Infection had set in, and the conventional therapies–antibiotics and surgical removal of dead tissue–had failed to stop it. Dugas figured he’d have to amputate both feet at least.

Continue reading “The Healing Power of Maggots” →

Discover, July 1, 1993

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Its stakes are high, says paleontologist Paul Olsen. Does carbon belong in the atmosphere or the deep ocean? Should Earth be hot or cold?

To most people the sight of antelopes grazing placidly in a meadow would epitomize the peaceful balance of nature. But Paul Olsen, a paleontologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, has come to see things differently. To him that meadow is just the latest battlefield in the primordial struggle between plants and the animals that eat them.

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Discover, July 1, 1993

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Ball lightning is no UFO. It may be something at once more ordinary and more beautiful–a floating ball of self-sustaining chemistry.

David Turner does mostly bread-and-butter chemistry. The University of Bristol researcher is an expert on steam turbines, and he can, among other things, describe the conditions inside nuclear reactor turbines and the possible hazards of an explosion. But recently Turner realized that his work could help solve a more exotic puzzle. The peculiar chemistry of steam could help explain a strange weather phenomenon known as ball lightning.

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Discover, June 1, 1993

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Bunny booms and bunny busts have deeper roots than bunny lusts. When dark spots obscure the sun, the clock runs out on bunny fun.

The snowshoe hare of northern Canada and Alaska offers a lesson in bouncing back from hard times. Every ten years or so, its population goes through a complete boom-to-bust cycle, collapsing almost to zero, then soaring back up just as quickly. A square mile of Yukon woods that had supported 600 hares in 1980 might have less than a dozen in 1985, and then 600 again in 1990.

Continue reading “Pacemaker of the Hares” →