Mathematicians Prove the “Omniperiodicity” of Conway’s Game of Life

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Back in 1970, the mathematician John Conway created a game with no players that evolves entirely from its initial state. The game is set in a kind of computational universe called a cellular automaton. This universe consists of an infinite grid of squares that can be alive or dead and that, at each time step, can flip from one state to the other according to the states of the squares around it. This cellular automaton has since become known as Conway’s Game of Life and famous for the extraordi ...read more

What Evidence Is There For a “Wood Age” to Rival Those of Stone, Bronze, and Iron?

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Stone came first. Then there was bronze. Then there was iron. Since the 1800s, scholars have split early human history into three separate “ages,” according to the main materials that hominins turned into tools and weapons. But what about wood? Was there ever such an age as the “Wood Age?”The answer is far from simple. Though there is no set period in human history that archaeologists have specifically identified as the “Wood Age,” scholars stress the sustained importance of the mate ...read more

Do Cats Have Facial Expressions? Cats May Not Have a Poker Face After All

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Our understanding of cats, their behavior, and their ways of communication is still in its infancy. While cat domestication has been around for over 10,000 years, dating all the way back to Ancient Egypt, there is still a lot we don’t know about our feline friends. And the pets seem, at first sight, to have only one facial expression: aloof.But research is slowly catching up. A recent study carried out by researchers at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has found that when interacti ...read more

When Do Deer Shed Their Antlers? And 6 Other Antler Questions

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

The animal kingdom is brutal. To survive, many animals have evolved with built-in weapons, including horns, quills, shells, claws, and tusks, to name a few. Members of the Cervidae family — including the white-tail deer, mule deer, elk, moose, and reindeer/caribou — have developed antlers to serve as a defense system. But they also have other purposes. Here, we answer all your antler questions. Read on to find out more.1. What Are Antlers?(Credit: Rick Fansler/Shutterstock) Antlers are bony ...read more

Have the Laws of Physics Ever Been Broken?

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Many, but not all, laws of physics have been broken over the centuries. Some are actively being broken right now, which is a good thing, because that means there’s more to learn about the universe.What Are the Laws of Physics?First off, the word “law” when it comes to physics has a bit of a loose definition, even among physicists. Sometimes the term applies to properties of the natural world that we have consistently observed to be true for a very long time. Sometimes the word is attached ...read more

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