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Category: Science/mathematics

Emergence: How complex wholes arise from simple parts

Emergence: How complex wholes arise from simple parts

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John Rennie writes: You could spend a lifetime studying an individual water molecule and never deduce the precise hardness or slipperiness of ice. Watch a lone ant under a microscope for as long as you like, and you still couldn’t predict that thousands of them might collaboratively build bridges with their bodies to span gaps. Scrutinize the birds in a flock or the fish in a school and you wouldn’t find one that’s orchestrating the movements of all the others….

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The periodic table is 150 – but it could have looked very different

The periodic table is 150 – but it could have looked very different

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Theodor Benfey’s spira table (1964). DePiep/Wikipedia By Mark Lorch, University of Hull The periodic table stares down from the walls of just about every chemistry lab. The credit for its creation generally goes to Dimitri Mendeleev, a Russian chemist who in 1869 wrote out the known elements (of which there were 63 at the time) on cards and then arranged them in columns and rows according to their chemical and physical properties. To celebrate the 150th anniversary of this pivotal…

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The blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience

The blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience

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Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson write: The problem of time is one of the greatest puzzles of modern physics. The first bit of the conundrum is cosmological. To understand time, scientists talk about finding a ‘First Cause’ or ‘initial condition’ – a description of the Universe at the very beginning (or at ‘time equals zero’). But to determine a system’s initial condition, we need to know the total system. We need to make measurements of the positions and…

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The importance of knowing you might be wrong

The importance of knowing you might be wrong

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Brian Resnick writes: Julia Rohrer wants to create a radical new culture for social scientists. A personality psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Rohrer is trying to get her peers to publicly, willingly admit it when they are wrong. To do this, she, along with some colleagues, started up something called the Loss of Confidence Project. It’s designed to be an academic safe space for researchers to declare for all to see that they no longer believe…

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Surprising hidden order unites prime numbers and crystal-like materials

Surprising hidden order unites prime numbers and crystal-like materials

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Princeton University reports: The seemingly random digits known as prime numbers are not nearly as scattershot as previously thought. A new analysis by Princeton University researchers has uncovered patterns in primes that are similar to those found in the positions of atoms inside certain crystal-like materials. The researchers found a surprising similarity between the sequence of primes over long stretches of the number line and the pattern that results from shining X-rays on a material to reveal the inner arrangement…

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Science, and government scientists, suffer under Trump

Science, and government scientists, suffer under Trump

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Joe Davidson writes: In an administration skilled in myth making, science suffers. Consider findings from the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit advocacy organization that surveyed thousands of scientific experts in the federal government. The first line of its new report paints a dismal picture of the place science holds under President Trump: “A year and a half into the Trump administration, its record on science policy in several agencies and departments is abysmal.” There are a couple of bright…

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The nastiest feud in science

The nastiest feud in science

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Bianca Bosker writes: While the majority of her peers embraced the Chicxulub asteroid as the cause of the [dinosaurs’] extinction, [Gerta] Keller [a 73-year-old paleontology and geology professor at Princeton] remained a maligned and, until recently, lonely voice contesting it. She argues that the mass extinction was caused not by a wrong-place-wrong-time asteroid collision but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions in a part of western India known as the Deccan Traps—a theory that was first proposed in 1978…

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Thinking about emergence

Thinking about emergence

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Paul Humphreys writes: If you construct a Lego model of the University of London’s Senate House – the building that inspired the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four – the Lego blocks themselves remain unchanged. Take apart the structure, reassemble the blocks in the shape of the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Eiffel Tower, and the shape, weight and colour of the blocks stay the same. This approach, applied to the world at large, is known…

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Anthropocene vs Meghalayan: Why geologists are fighting over whether humans are a force of nature

Anthropocene vs Meghalayan: Why geologists are fighting over whether humans are a force of nature

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Many scientists believe it is impossible to ignore the human impact on the planet when defining the geological age we live in today. Shutterstock By Mark Maslin, UCL and Simon Lewis, UCL The Earth discovered it was living in a new slice of time called the Meghalayan Age in July 2018. But the announcement by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) confused and angered scientists all around the world. In the 21st century, it claimed, we are still officially…

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Science and the Loss of Confidence Project

Science and the Loss of Confidence Project

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Dalmeet Singh Chawla writes: In September 2016, the psychologist Dana Carney came forward with a confession: She no longer believed the findings of a high-profile study she co-authored in 2010 to be true. The study was about “power-posing” — a theory suggesting that powerful stances can psychologically and physiologically help one when under high-pressure situations. Carney’s co-author, Amy Cuddy, a psychologist at Harvard University, had earned much fame from power poses, and her 2012 TED talk on the topic is…

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What are the limits of manipulating nature?

What are the limits of manipulating nature?

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In Scientific American, Neil Savage writes: Matt Trusheim flips a switch in the darkened laboratory, and an intense green laser illuminates a tiny diamond locked in place beneath a microscope objective. On a computer screen an image appears, a fuzzy green cloud studded with brighter green dots. The glowing dots are color centers in the diamond—tiny defects where two carbon atoms have been replaced by a single atom of tin, shifting the light passing through from one shade of green…

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The next big discovery in astronomy? Scientists probably found it years ago – but they don’t know it yet

The next big discovery in astronomy? Scientists probably found it years ago – but they don’t know it yet

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An artist’s illustration of a black hole “eating” a star. NASA/JPL-Caltech By Eileen Meyer, University of Maryland, Baltimore County Earlier this year, astronomers stumbled upon a fascinating finding: Thousands of black holes likely exist near the center of our galaxy. The X-ray images that enabled this discovery weren’t from some state-of-the-art new telescope. Nor were they even recently taken – some of the data was collected nearly 20 years ago. No, the researchers discovered the black holes by digging through…

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