Researchers have cracked the puzzle of how pigeons find their way home: they just follow the main roads.
Zoologists now believe the phrase “as the crow flies” no longer means the shortest most direct route between two points. They say it is likely that crows and other diurnal birds also choose AA-suggested routes, even though it makes their journeys longer.
| Meme: a unit of information that replicates from brains or retention systems, such as books, to other brains or retention systems. Memetics: the theoretical and empirical science that studies the replication, spread and evolution of memes |
| Systems Theory: the transdisciplinary study of the abstract organization of phenomena, independent of their substance, type, or spatial or temporal scale of existence. It investigates both the principles common to all complex entities, and the (usually mathematical) models which can be used to describe them. |
Unleashed viruses, environmental disaster, gray goo—astronomer Sir Martin Rees calculates that civilization has only a 50-50 chance of making it to the 22nd century
This article presents an overview of the work of Marcel Vogel. It is not a technical paper, but rather a presentation of possibilities as demonstrated in the life and work of one man.
Feb. 24, 2004—Flipping a coin may not be the fairest way to settle disputes. About a decade ago, statistician Persi Diaconis started to wonder if the outcome of a coin flip really is just a matter of chance. He had Harvard University engineers build him a mechanical coin flipper. Diaconis, now at Stanford University, found that if a coin is launched exactly the same way, it lands exactly the same way.
(AP)—Russian and American scientists say they have created two new ‘superheavy’ elements that will reside at the extreme end of chemistry’s periodic table of elements.
Just a few atoms of the newly discovered elements, 113 and 115, existed for split seconds after being created in a particle accelerator. They represent unusual forms of matter with properties that go well beyond those of the 92 elements that occur naturally on Earth.