The Strong Is What's Holding The Universe Together.

Particle physicists might seem like a dry bunch, but they have their fun. Why else would there be such a thing as a "strange quark"? When it comes to the fundamental nuclear forces, though, they don't mess around: the strongest force in nature is known simply as the "strong force," and it's the force that literally holds existence together.

Zoom In On The Elementary Particle.

To find out what the strong force is, you need to have a basic understanding of what physicists call the elementary particles. Let's start with an atom—helium, for example. A helium atom has two electrons zipping around a nucleus made up of two neutrons and two protons. For most high-school chemistry classes, that's where the tiny particles end. But you can zoom even further into the atom: those protons and neutrons are a class of particle called hadrons (à la the Large Hadron Collider!), which are made up of even smaller particles called quarks. Quarks are what's known as an elementary particle, since they can't be split up any further. They're as small as things get. There are two types of elementary particles; the other is the lepton. Quarks and leptons each have six "flavors", and each of those have an antimatter version. (The electrons in our helium atom are a flavor of lepton, so we're as zoomed in on them as is possible.) Heady stuff! Check out the diagram below if you're getting lost.

Forces Of Nature.

Following so far? There are four more parts to this puzzle we call the Standard Model, which is the theory of all theories when it comes to particle physics. Those parts are the fundamental forces. Two are probably familiar: gravity is the force between two particles that have mass, and electromagnetism is the force between two particles that have a charge. The two others are known as nuclear forces, and they're less familiar because they only happen on the atomic scale. Those ones are known as the weak force and the strong force. The weak force operates between electrons and neutrinos (another kind of lepton), but of course, it's the strong force we're here to talk about.

The strong force is what binds quarks together to form hadrons like protons and neutrons. Physicists first conceived of this force's existence to explain why an atom's nucleus can have more than one positively charged proton and still stay together—if you've ever played with magnets, you know that a positive charge will always repel another positive charge. Eventually, they figured out that the strong force not only holds protons together in the nucleus, but it also holds quarks together in the protons themselves. The force actually comes from a type of force-carrier particle called a boson. (Surely you remember the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson?) The particular boson that exerts this powerful force is called a "gluon", since it "glues" the nucleus together (we told you that physicists were a fun bunch).

Here's what makes the strong force so fascinating: unlike an electromagnetic force, which decreases as you pull the two charged particles apart (think of magnets again!), the strong force actually gets stronger the further apart the particles go. It gets so strong that it limits how far two quarks can separate. Once they hit that limit, that's when the magic happens: the huge amount of energy it took for them to separate is converted to mass, following Einstein's famous equation E = mc2. That's right—the strongest force in the universe is strong enough to turn energy into matter, the thing that makes up existence as you know it. We learned some particle physics, everyone. Who needs a snack?

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The SMASH Model May Solve The Biggest Mysteries In Physics.

For decades, physicists have been hard at work trying to answer the universe's unanswered questions. In October 2016, they may have solved five of them in one fell swoop.

To understand what they achieved, it's important to have a basic grasp of particle physics. Everything in the universe is made from a few basic building blocks called fundamental particles. Those particles are governed by four fundamental forces. Our best understanding of how those particles and forces interact is known as the standard model of particle physics, which has so far explained and predicted all phenomena in physics.

Well, almost all. There are still open questions. We know that nearly a third of the universe is made up of dark matter, but we still don't know what dark matter is. We know neutrinos have mass because they oscillate, but we don't know what that mass comes from (heard of the Higgs boson? It's one possible explanation.) We're pretty certain that a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe's expansion accelerated—a phenomenon called cosmic inflation—but we don't know what caused it. The Big Bang also should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which would have canceled each other out. Instead, it enabled the universe's existence by making more matter than antimatter (a process called baryogenesis), and we don't know why. Something called the "strong CP problem" helps explain that question of matter, but brings its own questions to the table.

Physicists say that the SMASH model answers every single one of those questions. Previous models that have provided solutions to a handful of them, such as supersymmetry, have done so by adding hundreds of fundamental particles to the cosmic menu, none of which have ever been witnessed in a particle accelerator. SMASH only adds six: three neutrinos, a fermion, and a field that includes two particles. The team behind the new model believes it could be tested in the next 10 years. Until then, we'll just have to wonder. Explore the world of particle physics in the videos below.

As far as we know, we earthlings have never made contact with extraterrestrials. (Right, conspiracy theorists?) 20th-century physicist Enrico Fermi thought that was a bit odd, considering the overwhelming likelihood that alien life exists. In 1950, his "where are all the aliens?" question became known as the Fermi paradox. Think about it: what are the chances that life on Earth is the only life in the impossibly gigantic universe? There are probably 100 Earth-like planets for every grain of sand in the world... yet we've never encountered a life form not born of this planet. What's the deal?

One explanation of the Fermi paradox is the zoo hypothesis. It's admittedly a freaky situation to consider, but here it is: aliens know we earthlings are here, but they're purposely avoiding contact with us, opting to study us from afar instead. 

This hypothesized answer to the Fermi Paradox was proposed by MIT astronomer John A. Ball in 1973. It's named the zoo hypothesis because it suggests that life on Earth is just like an animal at the zoo—look, but don't touch! Ball suggests that maybe alien civilizations are advanced enough to know not to influence our primitive society, or not to get involved with other intelligent lifeforms (the Prime Directive, anybody?).

A more popular answer to the Fermi Paradox is that alien life is still very primitive, or has already come and gone. At this point, it's really anyone's guess. These videos may help you consider the possibilities of alien lifeforms, and where, how, and if they exist.

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Want Your Produce To Stay Fresh , Never Use a Plastic Bag Again.

The sun is high, the sky is blue, the grass is green—summer's here. And for a lot of us, that means it's farmer's market season. But we all know the feeling when your eyes are bigger than your refrigerator, and all that beautiful produce (which isn't cheap!) ends up wilted, rotten, and sad. Good news: your artichoke heartbreak can be avoided. It's just a matter of making a space where fruits and veggies can thrive, and knowing which ones get along together and which ones don't.

Know before Stow.

First, let's lay some ground rules. Rule one: stop using plastic bags. We know—those flimsy plastic produce bags are pretty much your only option when you're actually at the market or the grocery store. That's why you should bring your own. Fruits and vegetables need to breathe, and they can't when they're cooped up in an airtight sack. Plus, it's just better for the environment.

Rule two: know what does and doesn't go into the fridge. Berries, yes. Bulb vegetables like garlic and onion, no. Peaches and avocados should ripen at room temperature, then go in the fridge. Oranges can be stored in the pantry or the fridge, but they'll last longer chilled. For everything else, well, here's a handy guide covering pretty much anything you'll find at an outdoor market.

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Eco -friendly bags Use this Always One Step to Save Earth.

You Gotta Keep Em'Seperated.

There's one last set of rules that you need to keep in mind, and those have to do with knowing what produce plays well with others. It all comes down to how and why fruits and veggies ripen. Ripening plants produce a chemical called ethylene, and the riper they are, the more ethylene they produce. But ethylene doesn't just come out of ripening produce; it causes produce to ripen, too. That means that if one apple is going soft, even its non-apple neighbors will follow suit (yeah, that "one bad apple" expression is legit). Too much ethylene leads to a loss of chlorophyll, which makes greens turn yellow and brown.

Some fruits and veggies produce more of the stuff than others, and knowing which can help you keep your produce fresh for longer. Apples, avocados, bananas, eggplant, tomatoes, and peaches all give off a lot of ethylene and are also quite sensitive to it, so you'll want to store them alone, while bell peppers, berries, pineapple, citrus, and kale are hardy enough to pair up with any other produce. In the middle are veggies that don't give off much ethylene but can easily be affected by it: broccoli, carrots, green beans, asparagus, and brussels sprouts, plus grapes and watermelon all can be kept with their own kind, but far away from the big ethylene producers. Then again, you can also use ethylene producers to your advantage. Want to speed up the ripening process for your avocados? Put them in a bag with an apple or banana, place the bag in the pantry, and after a day or two they'll be ready for guac. Yum.

Even if you bring your own shopping bags to the farmer's market, most people don't think to bring produce bags to keep fruits and veggies compartmentalized. That's where The Mighty Fix from MightyNest comes in. Sign up for this monthly subscription service and you'll start receiving eco-friendly alternatives to stuff you use every day, such as breathable produce bags. Made of a fine polyester mesh, the bags are translucent enough to see what's inside but will hold up to heavy use. They're also machine washable, so it's easy to keep them clean for future grocery trips. At this point, the fact that they help the environment by cutting down on plastic waste is really just icing on the organic carrot cake.
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The Best Way To Remove Pesticides From Produce.

Even the less-than-cautious among us still probably give their fruit and vegetables a quick rinse under the tap before eating them. That's in an effort not only to wash off dirt and debris, but also to remove any pesticides. You might go even further by using a vegetable brush or a store-bought veggie wash. How effective is all of that, really? More importantly, how worried should you be about pesticides in the first place?

Scrub a Dub Dub.

Lucky for you, science has tackled this problem before. Here's how effective the most popular produce-washing methods really are:

• Plain water: A 2008 review published in the journal Food Research International found that tap water only reduced the residue of five different pesticides by 20 percent, at most — but at least it's something. Distilled or filtered water may be more effective, and a good several-minute soak can go even further, especially for cutting down on bacteria.
• Soap: Soap isn't meant for washing food, and it's not clear how effective it is against pesticides. It could also possibly seep into the produce, making you ingest another non-food chemical on top of the ones you were trying to wash away. We don't recommend it.

Commercial veggie washes: A study in 2000 by the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station found that washing certain fruits and vegetables with a commercial veggie wash was no more effective than rinsing them under tap water for a minute when it came to getting rid of pesticides. Researchers at the University of Maine got the same result for reducing bacteria. The verdict: don't waste your money.
• Vinegar: The Food Research review found that washing tomatoes in a vinegar solution significantly reduced the residues of six different pesticides, some by as much as 94 percent. And in 2007, a Cook's Illustrated test found that vinegar reduced 98 percent of the bacteria on apples and pears. Cheap, nontoxic — what's not to like? Try filling a spray bottle with one part vinegar to three parts water and keep it next to the sink.
• Baking soda: In October 2017, researchers from the University of Massachusetts published a study in the journal Agricultural and Food Chemistry that said soaking apples in a baking soda and water solution for 12–15 minutes can remove almost every trace of pesticides from the fruit's surface. If you have the time, this one's a winner for sure.

It should be mentioned that none of these fixes can remove pesticides that have already seeped into the fruits and vegetables. If you're really worried (which you probably shouldn't be), general preparation methods like peeling, cooking, and canning can remove a substantial amount of pesticides throughout the produce. Peeling goes further than washing by removing the layer that the pesticides have reached; cooking and canning works because many pesticides degrade in heat.

A Few Caveats.

Why not just buy organic? you might ask. Contrary to popular belief, organic produce is grown with pesticides, too. The pesticides just can't be synthetic (and as we've mentioned before, whether a chemical is synthesized from scratch or just perfected from a natural source doesn't say anything about its safety).

In 2011, researchers at UC Davis found that the organic versions of the so-called "dirty dozen" list of fruits and vegetables that pose the highest pesticide risk aren't any safer. They also say that pesticides on those fruits and vegetables were way, way below the acceptable limit set by the EPA, and that the list "lacks scientific credibility" to boot.

But if you're still concerned, take a few precautions. Keep a spray bottle of diluted vinegar on hand for quick rinses and baking soda for when you have the time. Peel or cook the fruits and veggies you're most worried about. But don't stop eating them. The science is in on that front, and it says that you should eat your fruits and veggies if you want to live a healthy life.

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Two Mathmatician Solve a Decade Old Problem About infinity With a Breakthrough Proof.

Nothing will make you feel smaller or more mind-blown than the concept of infinity. Well, buckle up, because it only gets mind-blowier from there. Not only are there different kinds of infinity, they come in different sizes too. In 2016, two mathematicians blew the lids off their peers' heads by solving a decades-old problem about comparing infinities. Here is the 60-page proof summed up in just a few characters: p = t. Let us explain...

Uncomfortable Apples And Oranges.

Believe us when we say this article could be infinitely long, but ain't nobody got time for that. Let's start with infinity, a number that goes on and on and on forever. Because you could count 1, 2, 3... forever, there are infinite whole numbers. But, wait, you could do the same thing with just prime numbers. And even numbers too. Oh whoa. We just proved there are different kinds of infinity. Nice!

The numbers we were just talking about are called natural numbers, and they're just a tiny little branch on the overall number tree. If numbers are all one big umbrella, the category at the top that encompasses everything below is real numbers. A real number can be 3, or it can be √3, and it can even be 0.37846577246230456 — they're all real.

Comparing the infinite sets of natural numbers (whole numbers and zero, basically) is easy — there's a one-to-one relationship there. These are called countable sets because, uh, you can count them. Uncountable sets is what we're dealing with for real numbers. If you start at 1.0, is the next number in the infinite set 1.00001? Or is it 1.00000001? There are no spaces between numbers on the real number line, so they're uncountable, thus uncomparable to countable sets. Apples and oranges, people.

Every real number is essentially an infinity within itself, because you can have infinitely many decimal points. That being said, it's pretty clear to see that these overwhelmingly massive uncountable sets are larger than countable ones. This knowledge led mathematicians to wonder: if there are big and small infinite sets, can we have medium infinities too? Voilà! This question is the continuum hypothesis and it is literally one of the biggest (no pun intended) unsolved problems. In 1900, the German mathematician David Hilbert made a list of 23 of the most important problems in mathematics. He put the continuum hypothesis at the top.

Disproving the continuum hypothesis would mean that there are medium-sized infinities; proving it means there are only the bigs and the smalls. In 1940, mathematician Kurt Gödel showed that it couldn't be disproved within the usual axioms of mathematics, a.k.a. set theory. In the 1960s, mathematician Paul Cohen showed that the continuum hypothesis can't be proved by set theory. Ding ding ding! This won Cohen the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics. And so, we inched just a tiny little bit closer to solving the continuum hypothesis.

Eureka.

One particular infinity-related question has persisted since the 1940s, even after Gödel's and Cohen's work: The problem of p and t. Mathematicians believed that if we could crack this problem, we could once and for all solve that darn continuum hypothesis. And, phew, in 2016, the p and t problem was finally solved.

Enter our heroes: Maryanthe Malliaris, of the University of Chicago, and Saharon Shelah, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Rutgers University. The two mathematicians published a proof to this problem in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society and were honored in July 2017 with one of the top prizes in the field of set theory. (Here's a much shorter summary of the proof by Cornell University's Justin Moore, by the way.) But what'd they solve?

The question at hand asks whether p (one variant of infinity) is equal to t (another variant of infinity). Both p and t quantify the minimum size of collections of subsets of the natural numbers in precise (and probably unique) ways. The details of p and t aren't important; just know this: Both sets are larger than the infinite set of natural numbers, and p is always less than or equal to t. If p is less than t, then p would be a medium infinity and the continuum hypothesis would be false. Pretty major.

In 2011, Malliaris and Shelah started working on a totally different problem. (It was about ordering problems based on complexity, building off Keisler's order, in case you were wondering.) In the process, they realized they were also, kind of, accidentally making headway with the p and t dilemma. So they went with it. The two published a 60-page paper that solved their initial problem and the famous p and t problem at the same time. By proving that p and t are equally complex, they concluded that p equals t.

They proved it by carving out their own lane between two branches of mathematics: set theory and model theory. Their work is already opening new frontiers of research in both fields. Why does that matter? The more we know about math, the more we can understand the mysterious ways of the world around us. Thanks, Malliaris and Shelah!

(Psst — There's an unsatisfying end to this breakthrough mathematics story, too: Their work didn't solve the continuum hypothesis like mathematicians thought it would. Oh well! However, experts are pretty sure there have to be medium-sized infinities. Infinity is so weird that even the weirdest theories could be true, probably, maybe. Why not?)

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The Invention Of Zero.

When you were a little kid, even before you ever dealt with your first word problem in math class, you probably had to solve a problem something like this. You have four Starbursts, and you eat four Starbursts. What are you left with? That's right: sadness. And also no candy. But though even small kids can understand "nothing," the concept of "zero" is actually a bit more advanced; so advanced, in fact, that by the year 1200 C.E., it had only just barely reached the brightest mathematicians in Europe. This is the story of the invention of zero, and how a whole lot of nothing ended up changing the world.

Making Something Out Of Nothing.

It almost sounds impossible that ancient people wouldn't have the concept of "zero." Even animals can understand nothingness — just let your cat's dish go empty if you don't believe us. But there's a big difference between nothing as a tangible emptiness and zero as a mathematical concept. One forerunner of the mathematical zero can be seen in the earliest known counting system, devised by the Sumerians. At first, they'd use a blank space to indicate a nothing value, and when that grew confusing, they began using a pair of angled wedges as a placeholder for a blank space. But in a sense, that symbol indicated a lack of a number, not a number in and of itself.

Similar placeholders for an empty value can be found in other counting systems, including those of the Mayans and the Babylonians. But most scholars agree that zero as a mathematical concept originated in India. The earliest use of the round symbol that would become the universal zero comes from the Bakhshali manuscript, a merchant's document explaining mathematical equations for various transactions. It also included a placeholder zero in the form of a little black dot, and was in common parlance in India in the 3rd or 4th centuries C.E. Just a couple of centuries later, the symbol was used by legendary mathematical scholar Brahmagupta. In the 7th century, he wrote the earliest surviving explanation of how, exactly zero works: "When zero is added to a number or subtracted from a number, the number remains unchanged. A number multiplied by zero becomes zero."

He also worked out that subtracting a positive number from zero gave you a negative number, and that subtracting a negative number from zero gave you a positive. That's the first known account of knowing how zero works in relation to other numbers, and we can only assume he went on to coin the phrase, "Ditch the zero, get with the hero."

Arabic Zero.

Zero Goes Abroad.

After zero caught on in the Indian subcontinent, it was only a matter of time before other cultures began to recognize its significance. China and the Arabian peninsula were first (although it's worth noting that some historians believe the Arabic zero was a direct descendant of the zero precursors of Sumeria and Babylon), and it was in the Arabic numeral system that it first took the form of an empty oval. Muslim mathematicians called the symbol "sifr" (anglicized as "cipher"), and with it, invented both algebra and algorithms. And as Islam spread to Africa, zero came along for the ride.

But after that, it ran into some issues. Namely, Europeans. When the Moors conquered Spain, they brought their math along with them, and from there, zero made it to Italy. Where it was promptly outlawed. Yes, religious leaders of Europe saw the devil in that little blank circle, which they strongly associated with Islam. But the number didn't stop being useful, and merchants knew that very well. So when they'd include zeroes on their ledgers, they did so in secret — and the word "cipher" came to be synonymous with "code" in the process.

Fortunately for European mathematics, the taboo didn't last. Without zero, Newton and Leibniz wouldn't have been able to come up with calculus, Descartes couldn't have figured out how to graph points, and car dealers wouldn't be able to dazzle customers with the mysterious phrase "0% APR."

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The Lost Continent Beneath The Pacific Ocean

If there's one thing that excites us more than the idea of alien planets, it's the thought of what might be waiting beneath the surface of the ocean. Cthulu? Snorks? The lost continent of Atlantis? Unfortunately, science is a big party-pooper that says that probably none of those are actually real. Except...there really is a lost continent in the Pacific Ocean, and its highest point is the only part that's breached the surface. You know it as New Zealand, but there's a whole lot more Zealand where that came from.

Looking For Atlantis

Sail west from Sydney and you'll find Zealandia. Sort of. You won't be able to see it (not most of it, anyway), but deep beneath the ocean is a chunk of land spread out over 4.9 million square kilometers (about 3 million square miles) that broke off from Australia about 75 million years ago. Generally, we don't think of land masses as being continents if they're underwater — actually, we often don't even consider them to be land masses. But Zealandia meets pretty much all of the criteria: elevation above the surrounding area, a distinctive geology, a well-defined area, and a crust much thicker than that found on the ocean floor.

In one of the most intensive explorations of a "lost continent" ever, the Australian National University has launched a drill ship to explore Zealandia. The mission of the JOIDES Resolution is to collect sediment from the continental crust beneath the ocean, and test our theories about how and when Zealandia formed. Scientists currently believe that it was once a part of Gondwana, the supercontinent that also included Australia, Antarctica, Africa, and South America. But it probably broke off about 75 million years ago, and over the course of about 20 million years gradually spread itself so thin that it sank like an Oreo in milk. With core samples and mineral deposits, scientists will be able to strengthen these theories — or throw them out entirely.

An Army Of Atlantises

We've actually had an idea of Zealandia's existence since about 1919 (when it was known as Tasmantis), but it's not the only sunken continent on the planet. Another, much smaller, leftover of the great Gondwana break-up was discovered in 2017 and named "Mauritia" after Mauritia, one of its only parts to actually break the surface.

There are quite a few more of these continental crumbs, in fact, but only Zealandia has been deemed big enough to actually be described as a continent. The others, including Mauritia, Madagascar, and a bunch of tiny underwater islands you've probably never heard of, have all been deemed "microcontinents" or "continental fragments." But we prefer to think of them all as Snork sanctuaries.

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If The Eatrh Core Is So Hot , Why Doesn't It Melt?

It's a mystery that has puzzled generations of scientists: at the very center of our planet, within a liquid outer core, is a Pluto-sized orb of solid iron. That's right, solid — even though it's nearly the same temperature as the surface of the sun. How is that possible? Swedish scientists think they know.

I Am Iron Cube.

The atoms in a solid block of iron are arranged in what's known as a crystal structure. Those structures look different, depending on temperature and pressure. At the normal temperatures and atmospheric pressures we know, iron takes on what's known as a body-centered cubic (BCC) phase—that classic cube shape with eight corner points and a center point. At extremely high pressures, though, iron's structure morphs into what's called a hexagonal close-packed (HCP) phase, with each point surrounded by 12 other points.

The pressure at Earth's core, you might imagine, is extremely high—3.5 million times higher than the pressure you experience up here on the surface. You might expect, then, that iron crystals would take on a hexagonal formation there. Scientists did too: they believed that a cube structure simply couldn't exist in those conditions. But for a study published in February 2017, scientists from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden crunched the numbers and came to a surprising conclusion.

Playing With A Full Deck.

The researchers used a massive supercomputer to analyze a large amount of data collected three years previous at Livermore Lawrence National Laboratory in California. They found that the core is indeed in a cube structure, thanks to the very extremes that scientists thought made it impossible. At normal temperatures, that cube structure is unstable, and its atomic "planes" easily slide out of the structure into a liquid state. But in the extremes of the core, atoms are moving so quickly, so close together, that they don't have anywhere to go. Like passengers on a packed subway car, they just switch positions, but maintain their original shape. 

"The sliding of these planes is a bit like shuffling a deck of cards," co-author Anatoly Belonoshko explains. "Even though the cards are put in different positions, the deck is still a deck. Likewise, the BCC iron retains its cubic structure."

This explains more than why Earth's core is solid. It also gives an explanation for why seismic waves (the kind that cause earthquakes) travel faster between the earth's poles than through the equator. The way that atoms move among this cubic structure adds "texture" to the iron the way wood has a grain, giving it a "preferred" direction. Knowing that and other details about the way our planet is structured can help us make important predictions for what might happen to it in the future.

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Earth Core Is Getting Bigger.

The Earth's inner core is mostly made of iron, though whether it's a pure solid is up for debate. Temperatures at the planet's center far exceed the melting point of iron, but high pressure keeps the core from transforming into a liquid. (Some scientists classify it as a plasma that acts like a solid.) Every year, the inner core grows by about a millimeter as parts of the outer core solidify. The process is uneven, and unlikely to ever completely "freeze" the outer core, which would take around 91 billion years. Learn more about Earth, and our neighboring planets, We post Every Day Stay Connected.

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The Butterfly Effect Is Why It's Impossible to predict Weather.

You've probably heard that a butterfly can flap its wings in Brazil and set off a tornado in Texas. This is known as the butterfly effect, and while it shows up in everything from metaphors for human connection to the behavior of the stock market (not to mention an arguably low point in Ashton Kutcher's career), it got its start with a mild-mannered meteorology professor named Edward Lorenz. Just by rounding a few decimal points, he changed science forever.

Breezy With a Change Of Butterflies.

One day in 1961, Lorenz was working in his office at MIT, entering data into a newfangled computer program designed to simulate weather patterns. The simulation was a repeat of one he'd run already, but this time he rounded off one of his 12 variables from .506127 to .506. Then he left his office to grab some coffee while the computer crunched the numbers.

When he came back, though, it was clear that something was very, very wrong. That tiny change in his data led to a drastic transformation, completely changing two months of simulated weather. Instead of small changes leading to other small changes, Lorenz realized that small changes could have huge consequences. He published his findings in 1963, and the idea came to be known as "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" in scientific circles. It got the much snappier "butterfly effect" moniker after Lorenz compared it to the idea that the flap of a butterfly's wings could affect the weather in a 1972 conference presentation.

That discovery was huge. As far back as Isaac Newton, scientists believed that everything in nature was predictable. That is to say, even if we don't have the means to predict everything now, it's conceivable that scientific knowledge could become advanced enough to predict the behavior of the entire universe. But Lorenz's discovery showed that even the tiniest quirk can throw a whole system out of whack. Scientific knowledge could never become advanced enough to predict the weather, because the weather is unpredictable by nature. (No pun intended.)

Embrace The Chaos.

The butterfly effect gave rise to something called chaos theory, which you might remember as Jeff Goldblum's character's specialty in "Jurassic Park." It centers on hard-to-predict phenomena like animal populations, stock prices, and even human behavior. Chaos may sound like it's out of the realm of mathematics — if it's unpredictable, where do you even start? — but everything in the universe is governed by rules, even if we're not aware of exactly what they are.

Chaos isn't randomness. One of the most famous illustrations of this came from Lorenz, who plotted a graph of solutions to equations representing the motion of a gas. The result looked, aptly enough, like a butterfly. That graph highlighted how chaos always has its limits.

But when it comes to chaos theory, even our best equations can't always nail 100 percent accuracy. That's especially true of the weather. While a butterfly's wings can't actually cause a tornado, other small quirks in the atmosphere, like the exact location of individual clouds, can have big effects that we can't predict. As Lorenz wrote in his pivotal 1963 paper, when his results are "applied to the atmosphere...they indicate that prediction of the sufficiently distant future is impossible by any method, unless the present conditions are known exactly. In view of the inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of weather observations, precise very-long-range forecasting would seem to be non-existent." Fifty years later, and that hasn't changed.

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Volcanoes Cause Egyptian Revolt.

The Ptolemaic Kingdom ruled over one of the most prosperous periods in Egyptian history — it opened with the construction of the Great Library of Alexandria, and ended with the death of the world's first superstar queen, Cleopatra. But it was also marked by multiple rebellions against the Greece-controlled throne. A new study suggests that those rebellions had less to do with tyrannical rulers and more to do with unfortunate volcano eruptions.

Wouldn't You Volca-Know It.

Let's say you live in the shadow of a giant mountain, and the year after a new king comes into power, the mountain explodes. It kind of makes sense to assume that the gods hated the new guy, right? Except, that's not what was going on in Egypt — the volcanoes that were wreaking havoc on their sense of security weren't anywhere near the country.

According to a report in Nature, the period from about 300 B.C.E. to 30 B.C.E. was during a particularly eventful stretch of volcanic activity all over the globe. And that level of smoke and ash pushed into the atmosphere can set off changes far, far away from where the volcano actually was.

All of the material in the air had one major effect: it drastically lowered the amount of precipitation worldwide. No rain means no flooding. And for the people of the Nile, no flooding means no food. So even if they didn't know why the floods weren't coming, they still had plenty to get upset about.

Here's one interesting tidbit from the period. Cleopatra herself wasn't immune to calamities caused by distant volcanoes. But she also had a brilliant plan: she saved food. So when famine hit after the drought, she was prepared to allocate resources to the people most in need. The result? No revolt.

Putting It Together.

So how'd they figure this whole situation out? It all came down to pinpointing when the major volcano eruptions were in history. And in order to do that, they had to go to Greenland. By examining ice cores, researchers are able to find exactly when the atmosphere was filled with trapped sulfur. Then it's just a matter of comparing those years with the records of revolutions on Egyptian papyrus. And there you have it: big plumes of smoke can lead to big political flare-ups.

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The Centre Of The Milky Way Is Home To A Missive Fountain That Sprew Antimatter.

You wouldn't want to take a trip to the center of the Milky Way. There are a lot of wild and dangerous things there, including a spewing fountain of antimatter. But worry, you're safe to learn about this massive, violent plume of doom from a distance.

An Undetectable Annihilation Fountain.

In 1997, a team of scientists made a bizarre discovery using the CGRO Oriented Scintillation Spectrometer Experiment (OSSE): antimatter billowing out of an invisible spout at the center of our galaxy. This spigot of antimatter creates a plume that rises some 3,500 light-years above the disk of our galaxy. That's a lot of invisible annihilation juice!

To be clear, antimatter is the equal, opposite version of the regular ol' matter that makes up everything around you. The thing about antimatter, though, is that it carries an opposite charge to regular matter and can't be detected in space. Oh, and the fun part: when antimatter comes into contact with matter, the two instantly annihilate each other. This violent crash creates gamma rays, which we are, indeed, able to detect.

Sorry, No Mystery Here.

So, where did all of this antimatter come from? For years, some scientists believed the existence of this antimatter was evidence for famously elusive dark matter. But, alas, our hopes and dreams of observing dark matter were dashed in 2009 (for now, at least).

"There is no great mystery," said Richard Lingenfelter, one of the research scientists who conducted the studies. "The observed distribution of gamma rays is in fact quite consistent with the standard picture."

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The Universe Shouldn't Exist, According to Physics.

At the moment of the Big Bang, the incredibly hot, impossibly dense mass known as the universe exploded to create every particle of matter that now surrounds us. Here's the problem: the way physicists understand it, the processes that formed those first particles should have produced an equal number of antiparticles, thereby annihilating all matter and effectively canceling everything out.

But they didn't. That has left physicists scratching their heads for decades trying to ask this most basic question: why does anything exist at all?

Heads, You win.

Every particle in the Standard Model — the theory that describes the tiniest building blocks of the universe — has what's known as an antiparticle. Antiparticles have the exact same mass as their sister particles, but an opposite electric charge. For example, take a familiar particle like the electron, which has a negative charge. Its antiparticle is called the positron, and it has (you guessed it) a positive charge. Most antiparticles don't get their own names the way the positron does; the others just slap "anti-" in front to become the anti-neutron or the anti-muon. Still others are their own antiparticles: the photon doesn't have a charge, so the photon and the anti-photon are the same thing. Since particles are what make up matter, antiparticles are what make up antimatter.

When antimatter and matter interact, the result is catastrophic. The two particles annihilate each other, leaving behind a burst of pure energy. (In fact, the reaction is so pure and efficient that the writers of "Star Trek" decided to power the starship Enterprise with antimatter). But when a particle of matter is created the way it was at the beginning of the universe, it's always paired with its antimatter particle. Physicists have made this happen in the lab, in fact, and watched as particles and their antiparticles "oscillate" millions of times per second before they decay into another particle, one that's either matter or antimatter. At the beginning of the universe, this decay should have happened in a 50/50 ratio: half into matter, half into antimatter. And as you now know, 50 percent matter plus 50 percent antimatter means zero percent universe.

CERN explains this using a coin analogy: a coin spinning on a table can land on heads or tails, but you can't call it heads or tails until it actually lands. If you spin a whole lot of coins, you should expect that roughly half will land on heads and half will land on tails. Same goes for the oscillating particles. But in the early universe, something changed the odds, and we don't know what that something was. It was as if a magic marble rolled along the table and made most of the coins land on heads.

To Step Forward, To Step Back.

So what was it? Why did we get more matter than antimatter? Why is matter even a thing? To find out, physicists are trying to find the tiniest, subtlest differences between matter and antimatter. If a difference exists, it could explain why one got a leg up on the other in the early universe

In 2016, the Alpha experiment at CERN successfully created and measured antihydrogen, but didn't find any differences between it and regular-matter hydrogen. In early 2017, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider found that baryons — an umbrella term for the type of particles that make up the universe — seem to decay in a slightly different way than their antimatter counterparts. And in fall of 2017, physicists measured the "magnetic moment" of an anti-proton, only to find that it's identical to a regular proton. The search continues, and one of the most fundamental questions in the universe remains unanswered.

If you want to find at least a few answers to the fundamental questions of the universe, you might want to read Stephen Hawking's "The Grand Design." 

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