Kvarkadabra

What can we know about the world of atoms?

2009-10-22T13:16:00.000+02:00

At the end of April 1926, the then only twenty-five-year-old Werner Heisenberg held a lecture at the prestigious Physics Symposium at the University of Berlin. The title of his speech had attracted all the eminent German physicists of the time, among others the already very famous Albert Einstein. In front of this demanding audience, the young physicist presented a new theory on the behavior of

Why desert comes last

2009-10-22T13:09:00.000+02:00

When it comes to doing a great number of things, it is difficult to imagine doing them any other way than how we are used to. It feels as if our most deeply rooted habits were something natural and predetermined. The same goes for preparing and consuming food. Many would be surprised to learn that the order of courses in a meal as well as the established combinations of tastes in an average

Cell police

2009-10-17T08:00:00.001+02:00

Once upon a time, long ago when our planet was still uninhabited by plants and animals, single-celled organisms had developed an effective method to defend against the attacks of pesky viruses that even then caused epidemics. It is only a few years ago, that scientists discovered that the same mechanism single-celled organisms had developed as a defense system against viruses several millions of

Who really makes the decisions in our minds?

2009-10-16T10:05:00.000+02:00

Researchers invite you to take part in a memory experiment. Your task is simple. You have to remember a seven digit number and transfer it from one end of the building to the other. You are given your task in the reception room, then you go down the hall towards the other end of the building where you have to communicate the number you had been told. While you are walking down the hall,

How babies learn languages

2009-10-16T09:57:00.002+02:00

It is well known that someone who had been raised in Japan and whose mother tongue is Japanese can not tell the sound r from the sound l. If such a person were to hear the sentences He likes to read and He likes to lead taken out of context, he would most likely not be able to tell them apart. To him, both sentences would sound the same, because in his early youth his brain was adapted to the use

Brain plasticity

2009-10-16T09:54:00.001+02:00

Researchers of the brain have long believed that the brain, once fully grown, no longer changes. Only young brain was supposed to be plastic, as the ability to adapt is called in technical terms, and was believed to lose plasticity with time. However, research has shown that this belief is not completely correct. Mapping monkey brains At the beginning of the 20th century when scientist started

Feral children

2009-09-24T10:43:00.003+02:00

In 1996, Ivan Mishukov left home. Even though he was only four years old, he felt that the situation at home was far too chaotic for him to bear. He simply could no longer endure in this environment. His mother was incapable of taking care of him and he often got into trouble with her drunken lover, so he ran away and decided to try and survive on the street. Apart from homeless people, a great

What does the peacock's tail say?

2009-07-09T14:08:00.000+02:00

A gazelle grazes in the savannah. Suddenly, it notices a dangerous beast approaching through the high grass. At first it stands motionless. Then, instead of bolting, it leaps high in the air and continues jumping about two meters high right in front of the beast. But why? Is this not a complete waste of energy and would it not be better in terms of survival for it to run away as quickly as

Statistics against poverty and disease

2009-07-09T10:04:00.000+02:00

Not many people can read music notes well enough to hear the music in their minds just by looking at a score of a composition they had never heard befores. Hans Rosling, a professor of medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, claims that something similar applies to statistics. Pieces of raw data are like notes on paper, requiring a musical instrument and an interpreter so they can be

The Origins of Continents and Oceans

2009-07-09T09:59:00.000+02:00

Revolutionary scientific theories that turn the already established explanations of natural phenomena upside down usually require firm arguments to support them, before the scientific community starts to consider them to be serious. Even after clear evidence has been provided, quite some time is needed for a hypothesis that had before been thought of as heretic to be accepted by experts in the

Pseudo-patients in Psychiatric Hospitals

2009-07-09T09:56:00.000+02:00

In January 1973, the American psychologist David L. Rosenhan of Stanford University published a report in the prestigious scientific journal Science, on an unusual experiment that had been carried out by him and his assistants. He wanted to know how the staff of psychiatric hospitals treated its patients and how effective the doctors were in establishing psychiatric diagnoses. The article

Too much safety can be dangerous

2009-07-09T09:51:00.000+02:00

The Sunday of September the 3rd was a special day for Swedes. From one o’clock in the night until six in the morning all road traffic was suspended, except for emergency vehicles, and even these had to follow special regulations. At 4:30 am every single vehicle had to come to a stop. In the following thirty minutes, all the roads in Sweden received a drastic makeover. That Sunday, Swedes switched

Most Submitted to Authority

2009-07-09T09:45:00.000+02:00

In 1961, a professor of psychology at the American Yale University called Stanley Milgram placed an announcement in the newspaper looking for volunteers that would, for a substantial reward, take part in a study of memory. From a host of candidates he chose forty and invited them to his laboratory. But it would only be at the end of the experiment that they would find out that the professor was

What is Randomness?

2009-07-09T09:41:00.000+02:00

Even though it might seem that defining randomness is easy, this could not be further from the truth. Not only is it difficult to create random events or sequences of numbers, verifying whether something that we have produced is really random is no easy task either. Many great mathematicians throughout history have examined the problem of randomness, but it was only a short while ago, in the era

The Man with no Memory

2009-07-08T16:03:00.000+02:00

On the 26th of March 1985 a renowned British musicologist, producer at the BBC and choir music conductor Clive Wearing experienced a strong headache. He took a couple of painkillers, but they did not help much. At first, doctors were certain that it was just a bad case of flu so they sent him home. He rested for the next couple of days, but the pain in his head did not subside. At the time he was

The Man Who Believed Machines Could Think

2009-07-08T15:49:00.001+02:00

In 1952, the mathematician Alan Turing called the police to report that his house in Manchester had been burgled. The thieves did not take much, so it first seemed that the official statement of the burglary would be no more than a formality. It was not very likely that the burglars would be discovered and the stolen items and money retrieved. It soon turned out that the mathematician would have

Carl von Linné and plant marriages

2009-07-08T15:40:00.000+02:00

Born three hundred years ago, the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné became one of the most notorious figures on the European scientific scene. He had a very high opinion of himself which is evident in his autobiography where he spared no praise on his account: “There has been no greater botanist or zoologist. Nobody has written more books, in such detail, as systematically, and on the basis of

Alexander von Humboldt – adventurer and scientist

2009-07-08T15:35:00.000+02:00

There was a time when adventurers did not venture to remote places of the globe and conquer high mountains and peaks only to get an adrenaline rush and test the limits of their capabilities, but were driven by their desire to discover the unknown. The principal figure among these adventurers who were at the same time brilliant scientist was undoubtedly the German scholar Alexander von Humboldt,

Deadly virus from the heart of Africa

2009-07-08T15:23:00.000+02:00

At the end of August 1976 when 44-year-old teacher Mabalo Lokela returned from his travels in the north of Congo near the border with Central African Republic, he already had a high fever. After being examined in the mission hospital in the town of Yambuku where he lived, he was suspected to have contracted malaria, so he was given a shot of chloroquinine. His temperature came down, so he was

When our sense of probability deceives us

2009-07-06T10:15:00.000+02:00

The influence of numerous columns published in popular newspaper supplements where so-called “experts” shower us with all kinds of advice is not to be underestimated. These columns do not only form people’s opinions and change habits of entire nations; every once in a while they can also provoke large-scale polemics involving wider audiences as well as more professional circles. In the area of

Hobbits from the isle of Flores

2009-07-06T10:11:00.000+02:00

A decade ago on the Indonesian island of Flores, archeologists discovered the remains of primitive stone tools that had been made by our far ancestors. In itself, the find would be nothing special if the analysis of the sharp-cut stones had not revealed that the artifacts were at least 700,000 years old, which meant they were from a time when this area was believed to be uninhabited by people.

Searching for the beginning of time

2009-07-06T10:06:00.000+02:00

The Saturday of 22nd October in the year 4004 BC was a very special day. For quite a while it was generally believed that it was on this very day at 6 o’clock in the afternoon that God had created the world. This exact day was determined in the middle of the seventeenth century after years of research by an Irish bishop called James Ussher. The date became so widely acknowledged that, at the time

How Black Holes Are Born

2009-07-06T10:02:00.000+02:00

During the Cold War, both of the great political blocs were searching for inventive ways to effectively survey each other. It was of particular strategic importance to immediately detect any nuclear weapons taking place anywhere in the world. A detonation of a nuclear bomb on the Earth’s surface was relatively easy to detect using seismographs, but it was more difficult to recognize explosion

The Man Who Counted Infinity

2008-12-20T15:22:00.000+01:00

“There is a concept which shatters all others and leaves them in disarray. I am not talking about evil which is only limited to ethics, but about infinity.” Even though one might expect these words to have been written down by a mathematician or a scientist, this is not so. Their author is an Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, who succeeded in revealing the very essence of the problem that has

Erythropoietin – the story about 2550 liters of powdered urine

2008-12-20T15:18:00.000+01:00

Nobody has probably ever heard of Eugene Goldwasser, a retired professor from the University of Chicago. This is not strange as he is neither a Nobel laureate nor an eminent figure in his field of science. However, his name definitely sounds more familiar if we mention that he dedicated several decades of his scientific career to finding the molecule of erythropoietin, commonly known as EPO.