The basics of air bubbles Air bubbles in liquids - this is not only of interest to children armed with straws, but also to fully grown scientists. They teach the bubbles what the offspring still have to learn: arithmetic. Circuits are made of silicon, bits are made of electrical currents – at least that's the case for the ordinary computer chip.
Read more
Molecular Supermemory Developed A thirteen-person research team has developed and successfully tested an easy-to-control molecular memory with a capacity of 160 kilobits and an extremely high storage density. The device, designed at the University of California at Los Angeles and the California Institute of Technology, consists of two longitudinal lattices, each with 400 nanowires of only 16 nanometers in diameter.
Read more
Wrong assumptions affect performance When women believe that poorer math performance in their peers is genetic, they actually do well on tests among their peers who think it's an experiential phenomenon-that is, an imperfect one Promotion and training can be traced back to the social environment such as school or parents' home.
Read more
Predictable Harmony Do you think they know what they're doing? Does a Cecilia Bartoli have any idea of the transpositions and inversions in which she takes part? Is U2 deliberately moving through non-Euclidean sonic geometries with lead singer Bono?
Read more
Test procedure for quantum computers The working group led by Nadav Katz from the University of California in Santa Barbara and, together with colleagues from Riverside, has developed a method that could be used in the future to check whether calculations made on a quantum computer are correct or require error correction.
Read more
100. Birthday of Kurt Gödel One hundred years ago today, on April 28, 1906, the Austrian mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel was born in Brünn, today's Brno. With his incompleteness theorem, he significantly shook the mathematical edifice.
Read more
Thank the dung beetles How do you get economists excited about protecting insects and their habitat? With a capitalist-based cost-benefit calculation: the unpopular dung beetles, for example, save the Americans 380 million dollars in expenses - simply by building dung balls.
Read more
Archimedean Precursors The Minoan culture on Crete and Santorini left frescoes of impressive beauty to the astonished posterity. But the Bronze Age Minoans did not only show themselves to be gifted artists. They obviously knew some math too.
Read more
Swaying common mode It was extremely embarrassing: On June 10, 2000, London's first new Thames bridge in over a hundred years was opened - and had to be closed again just two days later. The futuristic-looking structure began to sway alarmingly as soon as pedestrians attempted to cross the river on it.
Read more
Perfect Stand They are a constant nuisance: wobbly tables. A physicist from CERN is now promising hope. There are supposed to be bars where there are more beer mats under the table legs than on the table. What mere mortals only annoy, because the glass placed on the wobbly thing spills the refreshing or invigorating liquid, tempts some scientists to get to the bottom of fundamental questions:
Read more
Inflation is greatly overestimated With an average of seven percent per month, the perceived inflation rate from January 2001 to December 2002, i.e. one year before and one year after the introduction of euro cash, was four times higher than the official rate.
Read more
Dwarf Logic Silicon-based transistors and microelectronic circuits have turned our lives upside down. Many expect similar effects from the hundred to thousand times smaller carbon chains of nanotechnology. Everyone is still waiting for the breakthrough.
Read more
The early network directs the worm Mountains of data are accumulating on the genetic researchers' servers. Genomes and protein structures, genetic activity profiles and libraries of protein interactions. But does the knowledge about life really grow with the archived bioinformation?
Read more
Perfect irregular For the first time, scientists have created a three-dimensional object that is neither crystalline nor amorphous. It bends light - but only partially. Technicians now want to take advantage of this effect. In 1984, crystallographers from the American National Bureau of Standards caused a great stir in the scientific world:
Read more
Happy Birthday MP3 The MP3 is celebrating its tenth birthday today. On July 14, 1995, the abbreviation.mp3 prevailed as the file name for the audio compression format in an internal survey at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen.
Read more
Small world, big chaos Theoretically everything is always clear. It's just stupid that reality sometimes doesn't think much of theory. Complex biological systems in particular often do what they want and no one expected. Even if they're no bigger than a grain of sand.
Read more
Quantum Mechanical Duet Thanks to Einstein, an Indian physicist achieved world fame: Satyendra Nath Bose. He divided matter into two kinds. One of them now bears his name. for Basic Sciences(excerpt) Many of you can perhaps still remember the embarrassing situation of standing at the blackboard as a student and being so excited that you can no longer make out the simplest connections.
Read more
Delicate hides packed finely Everyone knows the problem from city maps or street maps: once folded incorrectly, the paper can hardly be unfolded the next time it is used without tears and creases. What annoys us would be fatal for deciduous trees and insects.
Read more
Who's the boss here? One should know where to go. Or should go. Because in large groups it is not always so easy to agree on a direction. Who knows who knows something? And is that the right thing to do? Where do you want to go on vacation this year?
Read more
Business Award for Contributions to Dynamic Macroeconomics The prize for economics donated by the Swedish Riksbank – often referred to as the "Nobel Prize in Economics" – goes this year to the Norwegian Finn Kydland and the American Edward Prescott.
Read more
Coastal Building Guide Those who want to trace the coastline of Norway's fjords need a lot of imagination or a shaky hand. It is very easy to recreate a similarly rugged landscape with erosion, waves and a few rules. A team of French and Italian physicists has now found the recipe.
Read more
Mathematical century problem solved? The mathematics professor Louis de Branges de Bourica claims to have solved one of the great open problems in mathematics by proving the Riemann Hypothesis. The scientist from Purdue University in West Lafayette, USA, initially submitted his 23-page proof on the Internet for assessment.
Read more
Proof presented: Infinitely many arithmetic sequences of prime numbers of any length The set of prime numbers contains an infinite number of arithmetic sequences of prime numbers of any length. That's according to a 50-page proof provided by Ben Green of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles.
Read more
Spontaneous Supercomputing With more than a thousand networked notebooks, computer enthusiasts at the University of San Francisco want to create the first spontaneously thrown together supercomputer on Saturday. The "Flashmob" computer is said to be so fast that its computing power makes it one of the world's top 500 supercomputers.
Read more
The world of science is small Most scientists can be connected to any other scientist in the world through three to six known colleagues. The scientific community thus forms a so-called small-world network, as discovered by Mark Newman from the University of Michigan.
Read more
Severe criticism of the partial solution to Hilbert's 16th problem Numerous mathematicians have harshly criticized the publication by mathematician Elin Oxenhielm, in which she claims to have solved part of a historical problem formulated by David Hilbert as early as 1900.
Read more
Found new largest prime On November 17, PhD student Michael Shafer found the largest prime number known to date. This has now been officially confirmed by the GIMPS project (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search). In handy form, the 40th Mersenne prime is 2 20 996 011-1.
Read more
Part of a historical math problem solved The 22-year-old mathematician Elin Oxenhielm from the University of Stockholm has apparently solved the second part of David Hilbert's mathematical problem number 16, which deals, among other things, with the "
Read more
Nobel Prize for Methods for Analyzing Economic Time Series New York University's Robert Engle and University of California, San Diego's Clive Granger are honored with this year's Economics Award. With the prize donated by the Swedish Riksbank in memory of Alfred Nobel, the Royal Swedish Academy honors the work of the researchers from the 1980s, in which they developed new statistical methods for the evaluation of economic time series.
Read more
Hidden order? Scattered at random or sorted according to a certain system - so far the distribution of the prime numbers has not revealed its secret. At least three physicists have stumbled upon new interesting statistical relationships. Hardly any sequence of numbers has been studied as well as that of the prime numbers – those natural numbers that are only divisible by 1 and themselves.
Read more
Spherical Crystals It's easy to arrange billiard balls as densely as possible on a table. But which arrangement would you have to choose with a curved surface? The task sounds simple, but it is like squaring the circle: many particles have to be arranged as densely as possible on a spherical surface.
Read more
Algorithm recognizes trending topics by sudden word clusters Using unusual clusters of certain words, you can see which topics are currently popular or hotly debated. With an algorithm developed by computer scientist Jon Kleinberg from Cornell University in Ithaca, USA, deviations from the norm can be automatically recorded and trends determined.
Read more
Saying a lot with few words A good fifty years ago, a linguist suggested that the frequencies with which words appear in language are shaped by a compromise between listener and speaker. Now two researchers set out to prove this statistical connection.
Read more
Death to the tyrant Democracy is difficult and takes time. Animals that live together in groups should therefore do without this luxury and leave important decisions to experienced leaders - one would think so. But that's not the case. "
Read more
Two looks in one It usually takes two glances to tell that the front and back of a coin are the same - unless a quantum computer is involved. A good year ago, the euro made its appearance as the new European currency. On the whole, the changeover went smoothly, even though the new money gave us one or two mis-coinings.
Read more
Perfectly laced Crossing or zigzagging, the laces usually hold the shoe together. Obviously these two laces do the trick, but are there any better ways to tie a shoe? A shoe has to fit. And so that it adapts to the foot in the best possible way, the lacing must also be right.
Read more
Spiritual block game Millions of gambling addicts have only one goal in mind: Cover another row with blocks, reach an even higher level. But the computer game Tetris - this is now confirmed by mathematicians - is not only a real challenge for people.
Read more
NOT quantum mechanical Without logic circuits there would be no computer - this also applies to quantum computers. The potential supercomputers have a hard time with the logic. AND, OR, NOT - these are the three basic elements that make up every complex logic circuit.
Read more
The fractal ground beneath our feet Every day, liquids seep into the ground. Some of them are dangerous for humans and the environment. To estimate how these toxins travel, scientists use a mysterious mathematical property of the soil: it's fractal.
Read more
Bundestag election 2002 On Sunday more than 61 million Germans were able to vote. Each eligible voter had two votes. Read how your votes are turned into seats in the German Bundestag. On September 22, 2002 we elected the 15th German Bundestag.
Read more
