Anybody who has played tic-tac-toe has probably worked out that the game can always be drawn, provided neither player makes a mistake. Indeed, it is straightforward to create an algorithm that guarantees a win or draw regardless of the moves made by the opponent.This is a trivial example of a game that has been “solved” – one in which the outcome is determined from the start. There are many others that have also been solved but plenty that have not. For game theorists and computer scientis ...read more
Nothing calls to mind nonsensical treatments and bizarre religious healing rituals as easily as the notion of Dark Age medicine. “The Saturday Night Live” sketch Medieval Barber Theodoric of York says it all with its portrayal of a quack doctor who insists on extracting pints of his patients’ blood in a dirty little shop.Though the skit relies on dubious stereotypes, it’s true that many cures from the Middle Ages sound utterly ridiculous – consider a list written around 800 C.E. of ...read more
A shoe, a coconut, a tennis ball, a dead frog, a turtle, a mango, a ruler, a gecko, and a lump of yack dung — these are just some of the odd things frogs have been recorded trying to have sex with. Frog sex, in most species, involves the male gripping onto the female from behind for long periods of time — from hours to days — until they’ve succeeded in fertilizing their eggs. But mating can be very competitive for these web-footed amphibians, resulting in some individual mistakenly tryin ...read more
Giraffes are the world’s tallest mammals and an African icon, but they are also vulnerable to extinction.Giraffe populations have declined by 40% in the last 30 years, and there are now fewer than 70,000 mature individuals left in the wild. What are the causes of this alarming decline, and what can be done to protect these gentle giants?The five biggest threats to giraffes are habitat loss, insufficient law enforcement, ecological changes, climate change, and lack of awareness. Below, I will ...read more
The cars, cellphones, computers and televisions that people in the U.S. use every day require metals like copper, cobalt and platinum to build. Demand from the electronics industry for these metals is only rising, and companies are constantly searching for new places on Earth to mine them.Scientists estimate that lots of these metals exist thousands of miles beneath Earth’s surface, in its molten core, but that’s far too deep and hot to mine. Instead, some companies hope to one day search f ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine