Just yesterday, the European Southern Observatory announced the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting our closest star, Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri is located 4.22 light-years away from us and is classed as a red dwarf. So, despite its relative proximity, Proxima Centauri glows very dimly and is quite undersized, at 1.5 times the size of Jupiter. […]
Read more "Exoplanet Discovery!"The unguided processes of nature quite often lead to an illusion of design – assembled products that seem to be perfectly suited for their environments and that give a certain sense of being deliberately calibrated. There is a reason why this illusion arises, and that is due to the process of natural selection, which so […]
Read more "The Illusion of Design"A classic problem in computational mathematics is known as the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Suppose a traveling salesman wishes to visit a predetermined N number of cities. Each city is represented as a vertex of a given graph and each two vertices are joined by an edge. The traveling salesman must find the most efficient, cost-limiting […]
Read more "The Conundrum of the Traveling Salesman"The mere happenstance of a coincidental sequence of events, put together by the blind works of nature, has serendipitously manifested itself in this fascinating complexity around us today, that only appears to bear the illusion of an orderly calibration of deliberate design. This happenstance of undirected natural processes has led to self-directed sentient beings, pondering […]
Read more "The Happenstance of Existence"We take for granted the scientific norms and practices which govern many of today’s standard publication procedures in modern scientific journals. But, indeed, the development of modern scientific discourse owes its immense history back to 17th century England. Henry Oldenburg, a 17th century German theologian, saw the need for a means to disseminate scientific knowledge […]
Read more "The Establishment of Modern Scientific Discourse"One’s perception of butterfly flight is that it is typically characterized as some undefined haphazard flitter, but quite astoundingly butterflies flutter about from flower to flower and from bush to bush in quite a precisely targeted fashion. The mechanism of aerial locomotion in butterflies is quite intriguing indeed, ranging from steady undulations to rapid, erratic […]
Read more "On the Aerial Locomotion of Butterfly Wings"
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