In the ten-day window when the dates are all palindromes (9 10 19, 9 11 19, etc.), let's have some math news. Fans of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy can rarely pass up an opportunity for a 42 reference. The number is famously the answer given in the book to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. And now, it is also the answer to which number was most recently proven to be representable as the sum of three cubes. As with many math puzzles, the statement is simple but the solution … [Read more...] about Science Corner: Math Goes Sci-Fi & A Blog Film Festival
carbon
Science Corner: One Man’s CO2
Saprotrophs. Picture-winged flies. Dung beetles. These are the "another man" who find the meat in our poison. The Earth is basically a closed system with respect to chemical elements. The ecosystem needs every organism's ... output to be someone else's input, thus closing the loop and keeping those elements cycling. Otherwise one or more critical elements would wind up stuck in an unused form no one wants, and we'd all eventually run out of it. But of course if some element did accumulate in a particular form, there'd … [Read more...] about Science Corner: One Man’s CO2