Science

Science

Everyone Guesses 10 Pigs. The Real Answer Is 9.
There are 1000 barrels. Exactly two contain poison. A pig dies within 15 minutes of drinking poison. The death time varies. You have one hour. Find both poisoned barrels.
By Jin25 days ago in FYI
What if NASA reported this was near the Moon
It's a little after noon on a Saturday, and the news blotters and social media feeds are abuzz with chatter about a special announcement. You go outside to trim some bushes, do some yard work, and then run errands. You forgot about the special announcement. You do, after all, have a life.
By Jason Morton25 days ago in FYI
The Universe’s Thermometer Has Two Ends. One Is Absolute Zero. The Other Breaks Physics.
A thermometer has two ends. One end reads -273.15°C. The other reads 1.4×10³² K. Put those two numbers on the same ruler, and they look strange together. To see why, set the Celsius ruler aside and switch to Kelvin.
By Jin25 days ago in FYI
The Cat Eye That Saved a Life and Now Helps Robots See
1933, England. Fog covered the road. Percy Shaw drove home. His headlights lit a short stretch ahead. Two points of light appeared at the roadside. He braked. The car stopped. He saw he was in the wrong lane. Ahead was a cliff. The light came from a cat’s eyes. The headlights hit them. The eyes sent the light back.
By Jin26 days ago in FYI
The Blue Flame's 95% Rule: Why Alcohol Lamps Skip 100% Ethanol
On a lab bench, an alcohol lamp is easy to ignore. A glass body, a metal collar, a cotton wick. The flame is small and blue. The bottle beside it says 95%. Not 100%. Not anhydrous. The difference looks like a rounding error. It is not.
By Jin27 days ago in FYI
Human Waste Makes Concrete Stronger. That Is the Easy Part.
The Black Powder JAIPUR, India. In a materials lab at Manipal University Jaipur, a tray of black powder sits beside a concrete mixer. It looks like charcoal dust. It smells like nothing. The powder began as fecal sludge, collected from septic tanks and pit latrines, dried, and heated in a low-oxygen kiln until the organic matter carbonized. What came out is a porous, carbon-rich material the researchers call fecal sludge-derived biochar.
By Jin28 days ago in FYI
Idiosyncrasies of Nature
The animal world is amazing. From giant animals to tiny ones, many wonders can boggle your mind. For example, do you know where the elephant got its trunk, or that some male animals get pregnant and give birth?
By Calvin London29 days ago in FYI
Coastal Flooding Hits As A Reminder Of The Future
Have you seen the news today? If not, don’t be concerned. You’re not the only person who missed it. Today’s news centers around the US President. Which isn’t that unusual. But it should be. There seems to be little coverage of the catastrophic storms hitting multiple places.
By Jason Morton29 days ago in FYI
Why Sandbags Stop Bullets That Punch Through Steel
A rifle round hits a sandbag. The bag jumps. Sand puffs from the weave. The bullet does not come out the other side. A few feet away, the same round punches through a steel plate and leaves torn metal behind. The plate is hard. The sand is soft. The sand stops the bullet. The plate does not.
By Jinabout a month ago in FYI
Before Antibiotics, Surgeons Had One Rule: Let the Pus Out
This may sound like a strange piece of trivia: doctors did not originally prevent or control wound infection with antibiotics.
By Jinabout a month ago in FYI
The Yuan Dynasty Built Provinces That Made No Sense. Here’s What They Reveal About Empire.
The Yuan Branch Secretariats: puzzle provinces, enclaves, and the limits of empire The Yuan dynasty called them xing zhongshu sheng , branch secretariats of the Central Secretariat. The name matters. A province in the modern sense is a unit of local government. A Yuan branch secretariat was an outpost of the central court. It could be moved, merged, stretched, or abolished. It held military, fiscal, and civil authority. Its officials signed documents together, answered to the center, and served as conduits for revenue moving north. The map that resulted looks like a record of campaigns, tax routes, and temporary compromises.
By Jinabout a month ago in FYI
The Night a Neural Network Invented a Perfect Triangle
At 3 a.m., the training script was still running. Training error had hit zero. Cross-entropy kept dropping. In the PCA plot, the last-layer features contracted from a messy cloud into three points. The points were equidistant. The classifier’s weight arrows turned and aligned with them. No one told the network to be symmetric. It arranged itself into an equilateral triangle.
By Jinabout a month ago in FYI