A hurricane is one of nature's most powerful events. Here's how a big one is born and the climate conditions that feed it.
Explore Design-Kink.com's 896 photos on Flickr!
DIY projects done for Popular Science magazine, late 50's.
A list of predictions made in the 1990's that became hilariously inaccurate as time passed.
The Best Of The Worst
20 years later The Music of the Primes is still a groundbreaking popular science book. This new edition features updates from the author and a foreword by actor and director, Simon McBurney. In 1859, the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann presented a paper to the Berlin Academy which would change the history of mathematics. The subject was the strange and enigmatic prime numbers. At the heart of the presentation was an idea, a hypothesis, that Riemann had not yet proved but which has come to obsess mathematicians for the last 150 years. No one knows if he ever found the proof; on his death his housekeeper burnt all the personal papers. Today, the hypothesis is considered by many the holy grail of mathematics but has significance far beyond maths. At the of the heart of the enigma is a prize much larger than just intellectual glory; not only is there a $1 million reward for the person who can crack it but also is the key to all banking and e-commerce security. It is the idea that brings together many other areas of science and has ramifications within Quantum Mechanics, Chaos Theory and the future of computing. In 'The Music of the Primes', one of Britain's leading mathematicians, Marcus du Sautoy, recounts the history of these elusive numbers. It is a story of eccentric and brilliant men, last minute escapes from death, strange journeys, dangerous ideas and the unquenchable thirst for knowledge that drove some men mad and others to unparalleled glory. du Sautoy also tells a coruscating history of Mathematics. Combining in-depth knowledge as a practitioner in the field with narrative flair, this book will become a classic of popular science writing and will rank alongside 'Chaos' and 'Fermat's Last Theorem' within the genre. The Riemann Hypothesis: - Compared to Fermat's Last Theorem, the Hypothesis is mathematicians' real Holy Grail - Is the only problem from Hilbert's 1900 Centenary Problems that was unproved in the 20th century and now has a $1 million reward for the person who cracks it. - The Hypothesis is the key to all Internet and e-commerce security
Tall folks apparently suck up more resources.
Leaps in quantum computing is inching physicists closer to teleportation systems, but we're still a long ways off from 'Star Trek.'
Examples of outstanding talent which may or may not have been overlooked or forgotten. Compiled by a working illustrator and designer.
Image by Tamiko Thiel, via Wikimedia Commons Last fall, we let you know that Caltech and The Feynman Lectures Website joined forces to create an online edition of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. They started with Volume 1.
On April 6, 1917, a special session of congress declared war on the German Empire, officially signaling America's commitment to fight in World War 1.
Popular Mechanics examines the evidence and consults the experts to refute the most persistent conspiracy theories of September 11.
Sergey Gavrilets is in the empire business, specifically figuring out how, when, and where civilizations grow. Building a computer to recreate the age of empires, a team of researchers turns history into a math problem.
Men do go through hormonal cycles. What science has yet to show is whether hormones dip and rise over weeks or months, as women’s do.
What is time? In this segment of our discussion of time, we survey different aspects or interpretations of time including: quantum time, relativistic time, biological time, and some popular questions relating to time.
François Englert and Peter Higgs just received the Nobel Prize in Physics for laying the groundwork for the discovery of the Higgs boson. But can someone please explain what a Higgs is? Like, really simply.
Separating fact from fiction
Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 winners John. F Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger all contributed to demystifying quantum entanglement.
It's the oldest and most longstanding of all the fundamental forces. But what if gravity isn't fundamental at all?
A list of predictions made in the 1990's that became hilariously inaccurate as time passed.
