Discover Magazine will amaze you, enlighten you, and open your eyes to the awe and wonder of science and technology. Discover reveals secrets, solves mysteries, and debunks old myths. Discover shares new findings and shows you what makes our universe tick.
Your Curiosity Fix
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1 Humanity’s First Look at a Black Hole
2 Gene Therapy Gets Clinical
3 Race for the Moon • From crash landings to out-of-this-world cotton, 2019 was a big year for lunar exploration. Previously, only the U.S., Russia and China had managed to land successfully on the moon. But now other national space agencies are charging ahead with their own science goals, and private companies of all sizes are finding ways to join in. Not to be left out, NASA is renewing its own plans for lunar exploration. The result has been a year of lunar successes and failures — and lots of big talk — with final outcomes still very much up in the air.
4 A Million Species in Danger
5 Decoding the Denisovans
6 The CBD Cure-All?
7 Mini-Brains Make New Waves
8 Exploring the Farthest World Yet
9 Researchers React to Human Genes in Monkeys
10 A Melting Planet
11 The First Gene-Edited Babies Turn 1
12 The Bumpy Road to Launching a Dragon
13 Brains Brought Back to Life
14 Remembering the Opportunity Rover • After some 15 prolific years on the martian surface, NASA’s Opportunity rover has gone silent. It took a whopping planet-wide dust storm to fell the solar-powered robot, but, in February, the space agency officially ended the mission. We talked with NASA scientists about their experiences working on the golf-cart-sized rover and what Opportunity meant to them. Their eulogies for the lost rover, originally intended to last just three months on Mars, are below.
15 Mind-Controlled Rats Are Now a Thing
16 The Rules of the Road to Quantum Supremacy
17 New Member of Our Family Tree Found in Philippines
18 Editing Out HIV
19 Lots o’ Motza!
20 Most Massive T. Rex Ever Died Old and Battle-Worn
21 Talking to a Twin Traveler
22 Volcano Early Warning System Rumbles to Life
23 Skull Is Oldest Human Fossil Outside Africa
24 InSight’s Frustrating First Year on Mars
25 A Quantum Jump Caught in Slo-Mo
26 New Form of Dementia Strikes the ‘Oldest Old’
27 Measles Returns
28 Circuit Sensitivity Is All in the (Mathematical) Family
29 Our Universe’s Forgotten First Molecule
30 Navigating the Murky Waters of DNA Testing
31 A Paradigm Shift for Depression Treatment
32 A Bee Plus in Math
33 A Microscope That Sees DNA
34 Unearthing Quakes
35 Genes Bring Clarity to Anorexia
36 Unique Ancient Bird Preserved in Amber
36 The Mystery of Mars’ Raging Rivers
38 Reading Minds, Aloud
39 An Old Tooth and a New View of Evolution
40 Elon Musk Wants to Read Your Mind
41 Long Live the Kilogram
42 A New Tool Turns Up Surprise Slash Across Saturn’s Largest Moon
43 Rain, Rain, Here to Stay?
44 Oldest Fossil Fungi Hints at Early ‘Modern’ Life
45 EEGs Eke Out Buried Brain Activity
46 Early Start for Our First Continents
47 Smells Like Sargassum
48 Abra-Cadaver! Blood Vessels Come to Life
49 A Museum’s Monster Find
50 Rock-Eating Shipworm Shocker
Images of the Year • In 2019, more than a black hole caught our eye.
New Species