Working in the Indian Medical Service in 1897, British physician Ronald Ross discovered a malarial parasite in the gastrointestinal tract of a mosquito, proving that these insects transmitted the disease. He sent a poem to his wife that’s now inscribed on a monument in Kolkata:
He won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902, the first British Nobel laureate.
This is clever — a perpetual motion machine driven by magnets.
Unfortunately, such a machine simply doesn’t work — without an external energy supply, it quickly stops moving.
Why is the night sky dark? If the universe is static and infinitely old, with an infinite number of stars distributed homogeneously in an infinitely large space, then, whatever direction we look in the night sky, our line of sight should end at a star. The sky should be filled with light.
This puzzle is most often associated with the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, but Edgar Allan Poe made a strikingly similar observation in his 1848 prose poem Eureka:
Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us a uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy — since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star.
Poe suggested that the universe isn’t infinitely old: “The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.” We now know that the sky is dark because the universe is expanding, which increases the wavelength of visible light until it appears dark to our eyes.
The distinctive smells of spearmint and of caraway seeds are produced by mirror images of the same molecule, carvone.
The fact that we can distinguish these smells shows that our olfactory receptors can sometimes discern the “handedness” of such molecules. But this isn’t the case with every set of “enantiomers.”
From Lee Sallows:
(Thanks, Lee!)
T.H. Huxley believed in the precept that magna est veritas et prævalebit — truth is great and will prevail.
“Truth is great, certainly,” he wrote, “but, considering her greatness, it is curious what a long time she is apt to take about prevailing.”
(From Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, 1863.)
Terms for times of day in the reckoning of the Malagasy people of Madagascar, from missionary James Sibree’s 1915 book A Naturalist in Madagascar:
midnight: centre of night; halving of night
2:00 a.m.: frog croaking
3:00 a.m.: cock-crowing
4:00 a.m.: morning also night
5:00 a.m.: crow croaking
5:15 a.m.: bright horizon; reddish east; glimmer of day
5:30 a.m.: colors of cattle can be seen; dusk; diligent people awake; early morning
6:00 a.m.: sunrise; daybreak; broad daylight
6:15 a.m.: dew-falls; cattle go out (to pasture)
6:30 a.m.: leaves are dry (from dew)
6:45 a.m.: hoar-frost disappears; the day chills the mouth
8:00 a.m.: advance of the day
9:00 a.m.: over the purlin
noon: over the ridge of the roof
12:30 p.m.: day taking hold of the threshold
1:00 p.m.: peeping-in of the day; day less one step
1:30–2:00 p.m.: slipping of the day
2:00 p.m.: decline of the day; at the rice-pounding place; at the house post
3:00 p.m.: at the place of tying the calf
4:00 p.m.: at the sheep or poultry pen
4:30 p.m.: the cow newly calved comes home
5:00 p.m.: sun touching (i.e. the eastern wall)
5:30 p.m.: cattle come home
5:45 p.m.: sunset flush
6:00 p.m.: sunset (literally, “sun dead”)
6:15 p.m.: fowls come in
6:30 p.m.: dusk; twilight
6:45 p.m.: edge of rice-cooking pan obscure
7:00 p.m.: people begin to cook rice
8:00 p.m.: people eat rice
8:30 p.m.: finished eating
9:00 p.m.: people go to sleep
9:30 p.m.: everyone in bed
10:00 p.m.: gun-fire
Native houses were built with their length running north-south and a single door and window facing west, so they served as rude sundials: By 9 a.m. the sun was nearly square with the eastern purlin of the roof, and at noon it stood over the ridge pole. As the afternoon advanced it peered in at the door and its light crept eastward across the floor, touching successively the rice-mortar, the central posts where the calf was fastened for the night, and finally the eastern wall.
The sum of 2k – 4
From one to thirteen plus a score,
Over eleven,
Plus eighteen times seven,
Equals six cubed and not a bit more.
(Will Nediger, “Can Math Limericks Survive?”, Word Ways 37:3 [August 2004], 238.)
In his Canterbury Puzzles of 1907, Henry Dudeney posed a now-famous challenge: How can you cut an equilateral triangle into four pieces that can be reassembled to form a perfect square?
Dudeney’s beautiful solution was accompanied by a rather involved geometric derivation. It seems unlikely that he worked this out laboriously in approaching an answer to the problem, but how then did he reach it?
Here’s one possibility: If a strip of squares is draped adroitly over a strip of triangles, their intersection forms a wordless proof of the task’s feasibility:
Whether that was Dudeney’s path to the solution is not known, but it appears at least plausible.
From Lee Sallows:
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