If you like to waste your time in math class but also feel like you should be highly efficient about it, take a lesson from YouTuber Vihart. In five minutes, you too will know the art of squiggling a squiggle inside a squiggle inside a squiggle, also known as the Hilbert space-filling curve. An entire […]
Good news for the people responsible for fueling future spacecraft–a ring of antiprotons has been detected spiraling between the Van Allen belts. Theoretically, the antiparticle equivalent of protons could be used to power super-efficient rockets.ย “This is the most abundant source of antiprotons near the Earth,” says Alessandro Bruno, ย of the University of Bari in Italy. […]
Geeks rule the Earth, it’s true. But we usually do it on our own terms. Lifelong learners need occupations which utilize all of their skills and interests, or at least their best ones. But sometimes that job doesn’t exist yet, and you have to create it for yourself. To help make my point, I turn […]
The Big Bang is a complicated thing to explain, and try as ou might, there’s always a misunderstanding about what “something” versus “nothing” means and how one came from the other. New Scientist is running a month-long feature on existence, including articles about consciousness and the plurality. But the thing that caught my attention was […]
The Motorway Problem, also known as the Steiner tree problem, is a problem in which you have to find the shortest interconnect between a certain number of points. In the following video, Youtuber singingbanana explains a technique to easily find the solution. Check it out: [Source]
Why do we like an original painting better than a forgery? Psychologist Paul Bloom argues that human beings are essentialists — that our beliefs about the history of an object change how we experience it, not simply as an illusion, but as a deep feature of what pleasure (and pain) is. [TED]
Listen to physicists Laurence Eaves and Mark Fromhold as they talk about some of the concepts behind the infamous “Butterfly Effect“. Enjoy! [Sixty Symbols]
YouTuber mrfreshbeats combined some great footage of various NASA space missions with audio from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s talk on what NASA means to America’s future. Relevant, considering the current position of the US government against one of the first goals of its NASA agency. [Source]
Plenty of robots can fly — but none can fly like a real bird. That is, until Markus Fischer and his team at Festo built SmartBird, a large, lightweight robot, modeled on a seagull, that flies by flapping its wings. A soaring demo fresh from TEDGlobal 2011. [TED]
Reports that time travel has been proven impossible may be somewhat overstated, but it’s certainly looking unlikely. The main argument against time travel is based on the fact that the speed of light is fixed and that nothing can travel faster: in effect, it’s the speed limit of the universe. The explanation for the limit […]