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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