Category: Secrets
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Why ant colonies don’t have traffic jams
Traffic jams are the bane of modern life. But could it be possible that one of this planet’s more ancient life forms could show us how to better regulate road traffic? That’s the claim of congestion expert Dirk Helbing at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany and pals using a remarkable insight gained from…
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Slime Mould intelligence points to a new model of AI
Earlier this year, a group of Japanese scientists reported that with appropriate training, the true slime mold Physarum polycephalum can anticipate the timing of periodic events. That’s more than some politicians can manage and P polycephalum is only a single-celled amoeba, albeit a talented one. A few years ago a Hungarian team showed that slime…
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How leaves curl up in strong winds
Various types of plants, fungi and even animals are known to change their shape in strong winds to reduce drag. Leaves, in particular are known to curl up in strong winds. How they do this is not well understood, because of the dynamic nature of the problem and the difficulty taking good data. So Laura…
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On the origin of Saturn’s rings
One of the outstanding mysteries of our Solar System is how Saturn’s rings formed. We know they rings are made of water ice with very few contaminants. We know they are different to the rings around Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus which are much smaller and probably the result of the surface erosion of nearby moonlets.…
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New fractal pattern found in milk and coffee
Next time you stare into your 9am double tall latte, look with new respect. Japanese scientists have discovered a new type of fractal in the patterns coffee makes as mixes with milk. Placing a heavier fluid onto a lighter fluid always results in an disturbance at their boundary known as a Rayleigh–Taylor instability. Michiko Shimokawa…
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How big is a city?
That’s not as silly a question as it sounds. Defining the size of a city is tricky task that has major economic implications: how much should you invest in a city if you don’t know how many people live and work there? The standard definition is the Metropolitan Statistical Area, which attempts to capture the…
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The popcorn experiment and spooky action-at-a-distance
In 1964, John Bell became fascinated by the EPR paradox, an idea that Einstein had dreamt up to highlight what he saw as a major flaw in quantum mechanics. The paradox (called EPR after Einstein and his mates Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen) is a thought experiment involving two particles that share the same quantum…
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Solar system filled with dark matter, say astronomers
As the evidence for dark matter builds, astronomers have begun modelling how it ought to be distributed around the cosmos. They’ve shown how it must be distributed on the largest scale to make clusters of galaxies form in the way we see, various other simulations show that it forms a kind of halo around galaxies…
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Cellphone records reveal the basic pattern of human mobility
A few months back, we saw what happens when researchers get their paws on anonymixed mobile phone records. Albert-Laszlo Baribasi at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and some buddies used them to discover entirely new patterns of human behaviour. Now Baribasi has dug deeper into the data and discovered a single basic pattern…
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Can dark matter explain the flyby anomalies?
The flyby anomalies, you may remember, are a set of fascinating data indicating that spacecraft flying past Earth undergo a strange, step-like change in their acceleration. The Galileo, Near, Cassini and Rosetta spacecraft all seem to have been hit by this weird phenomenon and while that’s not a large number of data points, it is…