Skip to main content

The Ten Most Disturbing Scientific Discoveries

The Ten Most Disturbing Scientific Discoveries

Scientists have come to some surprising conclusions about the world and our place in it. Are some things just better left unknown?



Polar bear on melting glacier
The consequences of burning fossil fuels are already apparent. We have just begun to see the effects of human-induced climate change. (AlaskaStock / Corbis)



1. The Earth is not the center of the universe.
We’ve had more than 400 years to get used to the idea, but it’s still a little unsettling. Anyone can plainly see that the Sun and stars rise in the east, sweep across the sky and set in the west; the Earth feels stable and stationary. When Copernicus proposed that the Earth and other planets instead orbit the Sun,
… his contemporaries found his massive logical leap “patently absurd,” says Owen Gingerich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “It would take several generations to sink in. Very few scholars saw it as a real description of the universe.”
Galileo got more grief for the idea than Copernicus did. He used a telescope to provide evidence for the heliocentric theory, and some of his contemporaries were so disturbed by what the new invention revealed—craters on a supposedly perfectly spherical moon, other moons circling Jupiter—that they refused to look through the device. More dangerous than defying common sense, though, was Galileo’s defiance of the Catholic Church. Scripture said that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and the Holy Office of the Inquisition found Galileo guilty of heresy for saying otherwise.
2. The microbes are gaining on us.
Antibiotics and vaccines have saved millions of lives; without these wonders of modern medicine, many of us would have died in childhood of polio, mumps or smallpox. But some microbes are evolving faster than we can find ways to fight them.
The influenza virus mutates so quickly that last year’s vaccination is usually ineffective against this year’s bug. Hospitals are infested with antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus bacteria that can turn a small cut into a limb- or life-threatening infection. And new diseases keep jumping from animals to humans—ebola from apes, SARS from masked palm civets, hantavirus from rodents, bird flu from birds, swine flu from swine. Even tuberculosis, the disease that killed Frederic Chopin and Henry David Thoreau, is making a comeback, in part because some strains of the bacterium have developed multi-drug resistance. Even in the 21st century, it’s quite possible to die of consumption.
3. There have been mass extinctions in the past, and we’re probably in one now.
Paleontologists have identified five points in Earth’s history when, for whatever reason (asteroid impact, volcanic eruptions and atmospheric changes are the main suspects), mass extinctions eliminated many or most species.
The concept of extinction took a while to sink in. Thomas Jefferson saw mastodon bones from Kentucky, for example, and concluded that the giant animals must still be living somewhere in the interior of the continent. He asked Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out for them.
Today, according to many biologists, we’re in the midst of a sixth great extinction. Mastodons may have been some of the earliest victims. As humans moved from continent to continent, large animals that had thrived for millions of years began to disappear—mastodons in North America, giant kangaroos in Australia, dwarf elephants in Europe. Whatever the cause of this early wave of extinctions, humans are driving modern extinctions by hunting, destroying habitat, introducing invasive species and inadvertently spreading diseases.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Shi Cheng, the lion city under water.

China's Atlantis: How the Lion City was purposely-flooded to make way for a power station but remains completely intact 130ft underwater after 50 years Shi Cheng was once centre of politics and economics in eastern province of Zhejiang Covered in water to build hydroelectric power station in 1959 and was forgotten Now divers want to use the metropolis as a tourist site and have gone to plan routes,   A maze of white temples, memorial arches, paved roads, and houses... hidden 130 feet underwater: this is China's real-life Atlantis. The so-called Lion City, tucked in a lake between the Five Lion Mountain, was once Shi Cheng - the centre of politics and economics in the eastern province of Zhejiang. But in 1959, the Chinese government decided a new hydroelectric power station was required - so built a man-made lake. Metropolis: Shi Cheng, dubbed Lion City after the Lion Mountains that surround it, has lain hidden under 131 feet of water since 1959 to generate ...

Who really discovered the Jackson 5?

Motown at 50: Myth-busting: Who really discovered the Jackson 5? By  Peter Lindblad (Universal Motown) Diana Ross is thought by many to have discovered the Jackson 5. But longtime Motown promotions man Weldon McDougal remembers it differently.Having just been bumped up to director of special projects at the label, McDougal was in Chicago making preparations for a Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers show. They had a record out called “Does Your Mother Know About Me?” “So I [went] to Chicago [to] make arrangements at the club they were playing to take about four or five of the tables up front for VIP tables … things like that,” remembers McDougal. “Got it all situated so that when the main night came, which was a couple nights later, they would greet our guests.” There to handle everything on a Wednesday, McDougal found out the club was having a talent show that evening. The winner would open for Taylor two nights later. The Jackson 5 stole the show, and they re...