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ISSN 2537-7744
NOVEMBER 2017
ISSN 2537-7744 9
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ARE WE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE?
ANI M AT ED COV ER
NOVEMBER
2017
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Printed in New Zealand by PMP LIMITED, Auckland. D IS C L A I M E R The publisher cannot accept responsibility for any unsolicited material lost or damaged in the post. All text and layout is the copyright of Auckland Entrepreneurs Group Limited. Nothing in this magazine may be reproduced in whole or part without the written permission of the publisher. © Auckland Entrepreneurs Group Limited 2017 All articles and graphical illustrations were created and provided by TechnoBatyr LLP, Kazakhstan.
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SOCIAL MEDIA
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All that’s left of these animals is pictures. 5 animals that humans have pushed to extinction. p. 22
CHEMISTRY
The Evolution of Colours: how did we go from soot to “bluish gold”? p. 10
How does
BIOLOGY
Thinking of Going into Space yourself ? Learn what aches, pains, and struggles await you there. p. 16
the Human Brain, the most perfect tool ever developed, actually work? p. 28
TлBLЕ Of СоNTеns MATH
How can statistics be used to reveal dishonest elections and tax evasion? p. 4
Why is Space Silent? A history of our search for intellectually-advanced brethren. p. 42
Exoplanets: how do we find planets similar to Earth? p. 50
SCI-FI
ASTRONOMY
Science fiction’s
Top 5 Ways to Get to Space
GEOGRAPHY
How did our planet’s
EDUCATION
Continents form?
p. 36
p. 78
What is Speed Reading and how can we master it? p. 90
Nuclear Rocket Engines: myths and reality
p. 66
TECHNOLOGY
Graphene: water desalination, batteries, flexible screens, and an elevator to space. What should we know about the most promising technological development of the 21st century? p. 58 HISTORY
MYTHS & REALITY
The most absurd
Ninjas:
you’ve never seen war like this p. 72
everything you know is a lie p. 84
Military Machines:
M AT H
THE
FIRST DIGIT PHENOMENON
M AT H
Well-Worn Pages
Simon Newcome (1835−1909)
Before the advent of calculators and computers in complex mathematical calculations, the raising of numbers to a certain power or taking a square root required special book-tables, which were called logarithms. In 1881, observational American astronomer Simon Newcom drew attention to one oddity: the pages of these library books, where the numbers began with one, were badly worn out, and where the numbers started at nine were almost untouched. It was as if those who used the tables were significantly more likely to work with numbers starting at one. The scientist, of course, understood that neither he, nor his colleagues, were biased in favour of numbers starting with one. Yet, Newcom did not draw any conclusions from his observation. And another American scientist, physicist Frank Benford, decided to work out this peculiarity of numbers in 1938. For this, he studied more than twenty different lists with numbers, such as the basin areas of more than 300 rivers, the population of countries, the mortality rates in different states, the molecular masses of about 1,800 different substances, etc. Benford made tables, in which he was interested only in the first digit in each of the numbers. It would seem that all these lists and numbers were random — just like the results of rolling dice — and that the numbers 1 to 9 would occur uniformly as the first digit. But this was not the case!
was an American astronomer, mathematician and economist. He is famous for his scientific works on measuring the speed of light, the study of the origin of asteroids, and the calculation of the trajectory of motion of cosmic bodies.
Frank Benford (1883−1948) was an American physicist and electrical engineer. He is most famous for his law but also was an expert in the field of optical measurements (he had more than 20 patents for optical measuring devices).
Numbers starting with a one turned out to be more than 30%, starting with a two, almost 18%, and those starting with a nine — less than 5%. Scientists call this distribution of numbers uneven. The scientist constructed a table that shows the frequency with which numbers 1 to 9 occurred as the first digit in lists of numbers he studied:
The table here shows the kind of uneven frequency of occurrence of the first digit. This is known as Benford’s law, or sometimes called the “first digit law.”
30.1% 17.6% 12.5% 9.7% 7.9% 6.7% 5.8%
5.1%
4.6%
CH E M IS T RY
THE CHEMISTRY OF COLOURS
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less than 0,005 nm
10 km
nm
nm
10
1 mm ED
MICROWAVE
0n m
38
RAR
75
m
INF
0n
O
Y RA UV
DI
X-
T YPES OF EMISSIONS
RA
5 nm
750
0,00
1m
GAMMA
Between 380 and 750 nanometers — it is in exactly this range of electromagnetic waves that our eyes can perceive colours. Within this narrow corridor, we can see over 10 million variations in shade, light, tint, and hue. The most significant contribution to the portfolio of modern colours has been made by chemistry.
VISIBLE SPEC TRUM
BIOLOG Y
o ar ind
From our very birth, we have been extremely lucky to live on a planet with plenty of oxygen to breathe, that isn’t too cold or too hot, and which possesses an ozone layer to protect our home from the assaults of cosmic rays. But when we begin flying out from the confines of our Earth, our life and health will be in serious danger. We can scrape through out there, if we try hard enough
Enemy Number 1: Deadly Radiation Radiation, or the flow of charged particles, is our number one enemy in space. Radiation destroys body cells, damages DNA, and ruins our nervous system. Even here on Earth, we are constantly exposed to radiation. The Sun is the greatest contributor to this. Ours is an extremely wasteful star. It discards billions of kilograms of its own substance into the surrounding space, shooting it out in all directions at a great speed. This stream of charged particles, called solar wind, reaches Earth within approximately 30 hours. If it were not for our magnetic poles, solar winds would have killed off all living beings on the planet’s surface. In addition to solar wind, the Sun shoots solar flares into space. These solar flares can lead to health problems and disrupt the work of machines, even while the atmosphere is in place, keeping us healthy!
On a spaceship, a flash like this is like a small Hiroshima, leaving no chance for survival. Therefore, space probes are particularly sensitive to solar activity. Now the border of manned expeditions (that is, flights that include an astronaut) ends in the zone of the near-Earth orbit, where cosmic radiation is at least partially reflected by the magnetic field surrounding our planet. It is entirely possible that distant flights, such as the conquest of Mars, will have to wait until we can come up with a way to save ourselves from deadly radiation
A N ATOM Y
OUR Play-Doh
Not too long ago, some scientists claimed that the human brain does not change at all during our lifetimes, and that nerve cells can not recover from damage. But over time, it turned out that they could not have been more wrong.
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Brain
How We Adapt to the World Around Us
It was revealed that the brain possesses the unbelievable ability to change its structure, a property called neuroplasticity. In fact, without it, we could not live through sorrows, recover after accidents, or learn to ride a bicycle.
G EOG R A PH Y
The Case of the Continents No single person on Earth has managed to live even 4.5 billion seconds (about 143 years), and the history of all human civilisation adds up to less than 4.5 billion minutes (about 8,560 years), but our planet has existed for 4.5 billion years! It’s unsurprising that, in that time, its appearance has changed to the point that it is entirely unrecognisable.
Proto-Earth
Theia
A Dark and Stormy Planet
A Troubled Childhood Earth was formed from stardust and countless fragments that remained after the formation of our single star — the Sun. By historical standards, the planet’s birth was quite rapid: scientists believe that its formation took no more than 1 million years. Meanwhile, every few thousand years numerous mini-planets crashed into it, not to mention the countless bombardments of comets and asteroids, which were very common in the Solar System’s youth. ll of
these tremors “tempered” Earth’s character, making it bigger and bigger. ut 30 million years after the Solar System appeared, something frightening happened. Scientists believe that a very large planet, Theia, which was the same si e as Mars, crashed into the young Earth. Fortunately, the collision was not frontal: the “infringer of planetary movement” one grazed by the Earth. This, however, was enough to entirely “crush” Theia, and part of Earth.
fter the collision with Theia, Earth resembled a boundless ocean of magma — the liquid that spews from modern volcanoes. ut then the magma cooled, and the planet was covered in a hard basalt crust. If we were to look at the Earth from the newborn Moon at that point, we would have never recognized our beautiful blue planet. Instead, we would see a black ball with red arcs and cracks, and countless giant volcanoes spewing out even more mountains. Instead of white clouds, smoke
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ROBLEM ILENCE Judging from Hollywood blockbusters, space is a lively place. Getting from one galaxy to another in movies is as easy as travelling from the city centre to the suburbs on the weekend. Even from star to star – just like going to the store around the corner
A view from the centre of the universe Our civilization, which is only ten thousand years old, and its technological phase, generally speaking, for slightly more than a hundred years, was brewed exclusively from its own juices. We did not have any experience interacting with alien organisms. The great diversity of species, which presents many difficulties in the study of biology, in fact only seems to be so. Every living thing on Earth has one and the same common ancestor (the last universal common ancestor — A) and one and the same basic set of genes. From this point of view the mosquito, crocodile, fern, and human — when compared to some kind of uoride-silicon slime — are very close relatives, if not blood brothers. This limited experience gave rise to the so-called “anthropic principle,” according to which the centre and navel of the universe is the Homo sapiens, of which there are about 7 million copies. The Big Bang, the gravitational constant, Newton’s laws, the Pauli principle, electromagnetic induction and much, much more — all this is only in order for us to get acquainted, argue, fight, and fall in love!