One day in 1992, near the northern pole of a planet hurtling around the Milky Way at roughly 500,000 miles per hour, Kelly Drew was busy examining some salmon brains in a lab. Her concentration was broken when Brian Barnes, a zoophysiology professor from down the hall at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, popped by her bench for a visit. With a mischievous grin, he asked Drew-a neuropharmacologist early in her career to hold out her hands and prepare for a surprise. A moment later, she felt a hard, furry lump deposited in her palms. It was some sort of brown rodent with dagger-like claws, curled up into a tight ball and so cold to the touch that Drew assumed it was dead. To her astonishment, Barnes gleefully explained that it was actually in perfect health.
The creature, an Arctic ground squirrel, was just hibernating, as it does for up to eight months of the year. During that span, the animal's internal temperature falls to below 27 degrees Fahrenheit, literally as cold as ice. Its brain waves become so faint that they're nearly impossible to detect, and its heart beats as little as once per minute. Yet the squirrel remains very much alive. And when spring comes, it can elevate its temperature back to 98.6 degrees in a couple of hours.
Drew cradled the unresponsive critter in her hands, unable to detect even the faintest signs of life. What's going on inside this animal's brain that allows it to survive like this? she wondered. And with that question, she began to burrow into a mystery that would carry her decades into the future.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة December 2022 - January 2023 من WIRED.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة December 2022 - January 2023 من WIRED.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Women at the Bottom of the World
They go to Antarctica with dreams of studying the unknown. What they discover there is the stuff of nightmares.
RUSSIAN, GO HOME
WHEN MY COUNTRY WENT TO WAR, I FACED A CHOICE: Flee to a world where the truth might kill me - or seek peace in censored oblivion.
The Fateful Eight
THE STORY BEHIND THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL TECHNOLOGICAL PAPER IN RECENT HISTORY.
Can the Internet's Greatest Authenticity Machine Survive Wall Street?
When thousands of subreddits went dark in protest last summer, it exposed the tension at the core of Reddit - on the eve of the company's IPO. Now that synthetic media is flooding the internet, does the web's most reliably human forum represent a gold mine for investors, or an old-fashioned dumpster fire?
The Unnerving Presence of Javier Bardem
He's known for playing fanatics and murderous psychopaths. In real life, he loves his wife (and Brad Pitt) and cries during E.T.
HAPPY HAUNTING
IN A CHARMING game called This Discord Has Ghosts in It, up to 15 participants at a time gather in a Discord server that has been reimagined as a haunted house. (Of course.) Inside lies a maze of (chat) rooms where each player takes the role of either an eponymous spirit or a paranormal investigator.
THE MYTH OF METAL
How I became a Python programmer - and learned to love our abstract world.
SO YOU WANT TO REWIRE BRAINS
There's a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIS help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs.
FOR GIANT LIZARDS, PLEASE HOLD
The sounds of Slack have a secret history.
THE NERD-KING VIBES OF JENSEN HUANG
The Nvidia CEO turned a graphics-card company into a trillion-dollar AI behemoth. Now he wants to transform the rest of the world-health care, robotics, autonomous driving, the works.