Discover, September 1, 1993

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The growing power of computing has been harnessed to provide a patient, high-tech teacher for the illiterate.

The big players in the computer industry have spent millions in recent years on the development of multimedia technologies–hardware and software that combine video, photographs, graphics, text, and stereo sound. One offshoot of these systems has been a new way for students to learn; while reading about John F. Kennedy, for example, a student can point at the word speeches on a computer screen to see and hear the president at his inauguration.

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Discover, September 1, 1993

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Welcome to the technology of flatland. Researchers around the world are discovering ways to create thin films of chemicals, some only a few atoms thick, that can do many things no other substances can. Some are semiconductors that can be made into computer chips. Others have special magnetic properties that let them act as memory storage systems. Others are superconductors–they carry electric current without any resistance. And some thin films can make a knife edge as hard as a diamond.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Continue reading “The War Between Plants and Animals” →