Science

Science

Things That Simply Aren't True, But Maybe Believable
So many things get said and end up being believed. As children, we are extremely vulnerable. If we hear something enough times, we start to think, well, it must be true.
By Calvin London8 days ago in FYI
The Hunter's Moon Rises This Sunday. Here's When to Look and Why It Looks So Big. AI-Generated.
On Sunday evening, just as the sun goes down, look east. A huge, amber-colored moon will lift slowly over the rooftops and trees, looking far bigger than it has any right to. That is the Hunter's Moon, and this year it arrives at the end of October.
By Mitsuru Satou8 days ago in FYI
Crocodiles Don’t Age and Birds Just Drop Dead? The Internet Lied to You in the Most Interesting Way
I At four in the afternoon, Lao Zhou, a keeper at the zoo’s reptile house, squats by the crocodile pool and measures the water temperature with a long rod. The saltwater crocodile in the pool has been kept here for twenty-three years. The ridges on its back armor have been worn a little round by time, and there is an old wound on its left hind leg from a fight over food years ago. Lao Zhou says the crocodile has been eating less lately, but every spring, during mating season, it is as aggressive as ever. When it opens its mouth to threaten the crocodile in the next pool, the muscles in its lower jaw bulge, and there is no visible difference from ten years ago.
By Jin10 days ago in FYI
They Said Photosynthesis Would End Hunger. Then They Started Selling the Sun.
The Sunward Ones At noon, wind knocked a plastic cup off the rooftop. Lin Zhao pulled his jacket to his shoulders and pressed the green membrane on his back against the concrete. The guard lifted a megaphone. Turn over. Three minutes. Don’t burn.
By Jin14 days ago in FYI
The Twin Paradox Isn’t a Paradox: Why the Traveling Twin Comes Back Younger
There is a pair of twins. One stays on Earth. The other boards a ship, flies away at nearly the speed of light, and returns after one year. The traveling twin feels that only one year has passed. The Earth twin has aged ninety-nine more years. Then the question arrives: speed is relative. If we use the ship as the reference frame, Earth is also moving away at nearly the speed of light. So why is it the ship’s clock that lost time? Why not Earth’s time that slowed down?
By Jin14 days ago in FYI
The Strange Reason Identical Twins Have Different Fingerprints
Identical twins can look so alike that strangers confuse them. Press their ten fingers onto paper, and the prints do not match. The ridges flow differently. Bifurcations land in different places. Triradii and minutiae do not line up. The difference is not a small detail at the edges. Each fingerprint is its own pattern.
By Jin14 days ago in FYI
The Zoo Chimpanzee Isn't Waiting to Become Human
In a zoo, a chimpanzee squats in the corner of its enclosure and flips a stone over. It chooses a flatter one for an anvil. It picks up a nut, sets it on the stone, lifts another stone, and brings it down. The shell cracks. It eats the kernel and reaches for the next nut.
By Jin17 days ago in FYI
Was the Origin of Animals a Coincidence? Rewind the Tape and See What Happens
About 2.1 billion years ago, shallow seas held free oxygen for the first time. A group of organisms lived there and died there. They are called the Francevillian biota. They were flat, soft, and slow. The fossils suggest they were among the first life forms to use oxygen for respiration. That would have given them an energy advantage. For hundreds of millions of years, they persisted. Then they vanished.
By Jin17 days ago in FYI
OpenAI Cracked Three ‘Impossible’ Math Barriers. The Cracks Are Almost Invisible.
The first reaction is disbelief. For integer multiplication and FFT, the exponents look like rounding errors dressed up as theorems. A saving of 2−182 in an exponent is not a breakthrough in any ordinary sense. It is a number so small that writing its distance from zero takes more digits than there are atoms in a person. The prose around these results does not help. It reads like AI-generated mathematics: simple concepts explained at length, difficult constructions mentioned in passing, new terminology introduced without definition, no sense of proportion.
By Jin17 days ago in FYI
Where does a compressed spring’s energy go when you drop it in acid?
1. The spring in the beaker On the lab bench there is a spring. Two steel plates compress it to half its original length. Four bolts hold the plates tight, so the spring cannot open. A beaker of dilute hydrochloric acid sits nearby. The liquid level just covers the spring. Bubbles form on the steel surface. They are small and dense, and they crawl up along the wire.
By Jin18 days ago in FYI
Why Shenzhou Burns Up and Crew Dragon Flies Again
Inside the Soyuz descent module, three seats fill the cabin. A cosmonaut’s knees almost touch the instrument panel. There is no room to stretch. Soviet engineers designed the module this way because they were thinking about the Moon. The descent module had to be small and light. It only needed to carry three people from lunar orbit back to Earth. Living quarters, experiments, propulsion, and power would go in other modules.
By Jin18 days ago in FYI
The Real Reason One Late Train Never Crashes the Whole Railway System
At a Spring Festival platform, the board shows a red “delayed.” A train arrives four minutes behind. Doors open. Passengers push out, others push in. The conductor blows a whistle. The train leaves four minutes behind. It cannot leave early. If it arrives early, it waits. The system looks like a machine that only stores delay. Every late arrival becomes a late departure. Every late departure becomes a late arrival down the line. Why doesn’t the whole timetable drift into chaos?
By Jin20 days ago in FYI