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Science

1,604 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 18 of 27.

1021. Schrödinger wrote his famous wave equation while recovering in a Swiss sanatoriumTuberculosis sent Erwin Schrödinger to a sanatorium in Arosa several times in the 1920s, and there he worked out the equation at the heart of quantum mechanics. He later coined th…
1022. The father of geometry is almost a complete mystery as a personEuclid's Elements dominated geometry for more than two thousand years, until the early 19th century. Yet nobody knows when he was born, and nearly everything about his life comes …
1023. The man behind the flat gramophone record also built early helicoptersEmile Berliner gave the world the flat, laterally cut disc record, which could be stamped out in copies from a master. The same restless inventor designed an early microphone, los…
1024. Emmy Noether lectured for four years under David Hilbert's nameWhen Göttingen's philosophy faculty balked at hiring a woman, Emmy Noether spent four years teaching courses advertised as Hilbert's. Her theorem linking symmetry to conservation …
1025. Fermi's Nobel-winning new elements turned out to be fission productsEnrico Fermi won the 1938 Nobel Prize partly for creating new elements by firing slow neutrons at uranium and thorium. What he had actually produced were fragments of split atoms.…
1026. Almost all we know of Diophantus's life comes from an algebra riddleLagrange called Diophantus the inventor of algebra, yet his dates could fall anywhere across five centuries. The one personal detail is a puzzle in the Greek Anthology describing …
1027. Mendeleev's periodic table predicted three elements nobody had yet foundDmitri Mendeleev did more than tidy the known elements into rows. His periodic law let him correct uranium's atomic weight and forecast the properties of gallium, germanium and sc…
1028. Donald Knuth's book on compilers grew into a seven-volume life's workIn 1962 a publisher asked Donald Knuth for a book on compilers. He decided he first needed a theory of programming itself, and the project swelled into The Art of Computer Program…
1029. Dorothy Hodgkin spent 35 years working out the structure of insulinUsing X-rays bounced off crystals, Dorothy Hodgkin revealed the shapes of penicillin, vitamin B12 and, after three and a half decades, insulin. She remains the only British woman …
1030. The computer mouse and hypertext both debuted at a single 1968 demonstrationIn 1968 Douglas Engelbart showed an audience a pointing device called a mouse, linked text, word processing and bitmapped screens, when most people could only reach a computer thr…
1031. Dijkstra's marriage certificate refused 'programmer' because no such job existedWhen Edsger Dijkstra married in 1957 and gave his profession as programmer, Dutch officials rejected it as not a real occupation. He had been the Netherlands' first one since 1952…
1032. Edward Drinker Cope named over 1,000 vertebrate species and nearly went brokeCope published 1,400 papers and described more than a thousand backboned animals, including dozens of dinosaurs. His feud with Othniel Charles Marsh set off the fossil race known …
1033. Edward Teller's father once travelled to Karlsruhe to question his switch to physicsEdward Teller, remembered as the father of the hydrogen bomb, nearly became a chemical engineer. Lectures by visiting professor Herman Mark convinced him that new physics was tran…
1034. Before proving the universe expands, Edwin Hubble studied law and coached basketballEdwin Hubble showed that many so-called nebulae were galaxies far beyond the Milky Way, and in 1929 confirmed that distant galaxies recede faster. Yet he first trained in law to h…
1035. A government accountant did world-class physics in his spare hours and won a NobelC. V. Raman spent years auditing accounts for the colonial finance service while running experiments at night in a Calcutta institute. A sea voyage made him doubt the accepted rea…
1036. Chien-Shiung Wu proved nature can tell left from right; colleagues got the NobelPhysicists long assumed the laws of nature do not distinguish a process from its mirror image. Chien-Shiung Wu's experiment showed that assumption, parity conservation, fails. Tsu…
1037. Huygens's pendulum clock stayed the most accurate timekeeper for almost 300 yearsChristiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock, found Saturn's moon Titan, explained the planet's rings, and worked out centrifugal force a decade ahead of Newton. His wave theory…
1038. Claude Bernard wanted to be a playwright; a critic sent him to medicineIn 1834 a young druggist's assistant took his five-act tragedy to a Paris critic, who told him to study medicine instead. Claude Bernard went on to explain how the body keeps its …
1039. A student's master's thesis became the birth certificate of digital computingIn 1937 Claude Shannon showed that on-off electrical switches could carry out any operation of Boolean logic. That insight underpins every digital circuit. Eleven years later he f…
1040. Daniel Bernoulli tied his father for a prize, and his father banned himWhen Daniel Bernoulli shared first place with his father Johann in a Paris science contest, Johann reportedly threw him out of the house, unable to bear being matched. He is also …
1041. Hilbert's 1900 problem list steered a century of mathematicsIn 1900 David Hilbert presented a set of unsolved problems that shaped what mathematicians worked on for the next hundred years. He turned Gottingen into the world's leading mathe…
1042. Dennis Ritchie's C language lives inside almost every modern programming languageWorking with Ken Thompson at Bell Labs, Dennis Ritchie created the C language and helped build Unix, whose name began as a pun. C shaped C++, Java and C sharp, and Unix thinking r…
1043. The father of fibre optics realised the glass, not the idea, was faultyIn the early 1960s, light sent down glass fibres faded so fast that the idea looked hopeless for communications. Charles Kao, a young engineer in Harlow, England, showed the losse…
1044. The geologist who taught Darwin to think in deep timeCharles Lyell argued that the forces shaping Earth today, erosion, earthquakes and volcanoes working at ordinary rates, could explain its entire history if given enough time. His …
1045. Cells sometimes misread their own genetic code on purposeTranslation turns a string of RNA letters into a protein, reading three letters per amino acid. Accuracy depends on enzymes that load each carrier molecule with the right amino ac…
1046. A single water sac can fill 80 percent of a plant cellMost mature plant cells are dominated by one large vacuole, usually more than 30 percent of the cell's volume and sometimes as much as 80. Pumped full of water, it keeps leaves an…
1047. 'Powerhouse of the cell' comes from a 1957 magazine articleEvery biology student learns that mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. The phrase was popularised by Philip Siekevitz in a 1957 Scientific American article with that title…
1048. Mitosis is named after the Greek word for a loom's warp threadWhen Walther Flemming watched chromosomes condensing into threads during cell division, he named the process mitosis in 1882, from Greek mitos, the warp thread on a loom. The proc…
1049. Is a ribosome an organelle? Depends which biologist you askOrganelle literally means 'little organ', a term the German zoologist Karl August Mobius proposed in 1884 for the working parts of single cells. Yet biologists still disagree on w…
1050. The strings in celery are living cells built for stretchy supportPull a string from a celery stalk and you are holding collenchyma, plant cells with walls thickened at the corners yet free of rigid lignin. They hold young stems upright while st…
1051. Bacteria swap tiny loops of DNA, even across species linesAlongside their main chromosome, many bacteria carry plasmids: small, self-copying rings of DNA holding optional extras such as antibiotic resistance or the ability to digest toxi…
1052. Plants became green by swallowing a bacterium 1.5 billion years agoEvery chloroplast descends from a cyanobacterium that took up permanent residence inside a host cell around 1.5 billion years ago. Astonishingly, it happened again far more recent…
1053. Your fingers exist because the cells between them chose to dieIn a developing embryo, hands start out as paddles. The digits separate only because the cells in between switch on a built-in self-destruct routine. Such programmed cell death sh…
1054. The ribosome, which builds all proteins, runs on RNA rather than proteinEvery cell on Earth relies on ribosomes to read genetic instructions and string amino acids into proteins. The surprise is in the machinery: the chemical step that joins each amin…
1055. Genes can be switched on by DNA sitting far awayCopying a gene from DNA into RNA is the first step in using it, but what decides when that happens is often not next door. Stretches called enhancers, sometimes hundreds of thousa…
1056. E. coli can double its numbers every 20 minutes by splitting in twoBacteria and archaea reproduce by the simplest method imaginable: copy the DNA, grow, and pinch in half. At body temperature E. coli manages this roughly every 20 minutes, while s…
1057. Bacteria swim with a rotary motor that can spin 100,000 rpmA bacterial flagellum is a genuine rotating machine: a protein motor, driven by a flow of protons across the membrane, turns a helical propeller. Unloaded, the rotor can reach 6,0…
1058. Spoiled French wine helped uncover how every cell burns sugarIn the 1850s the French wine trade wanted to know why some batches went sour instead of turning to alcohol. Louis Pasteur's answer, that living yeasts drive fermentation, launched…
1059. Critics once dismissed the Golgi apparatus as an optical illusionIn 1898 the Italian physician Camillo Golgi, studying nerve tissue, spotted a strange internal network in cells. Some colleagues suspected it was an artefact of his staining metho…
1060. Each of your cells holds hundreds of tiny acid-filled recycling binsLysosomes are the cell's demolition crews: sealed pouches of acid holding more than 60 digestive enzymes that break proteins, sugars and fats back into reusable parts. The design …
1061. Before making an egg or sperm, your chromosomes trade piecesMeiosis is the cell division behind sex. It halves the chromosome count so egg and sperm can combine, but first each maternal and paternal chromosome pair swaps segments, shufflin…
1062. Fermentation: the inefficient trick behind bread, beer and sprinting musclesPasteur called it life without air. Fermentation lets cells squeeze energy from sugar with no oxygen at all, and people have exploited it to make and preserve food for some 13,000…
1063. A plant stays upright like a balloon inflated inside a wicker basketPlant cell walls are actually flexible. What makes stems stiff is water pressure: each cell swells against its wall like a balloon blown up inside a wicker basket, as the biologis…
1064. Textbooks promise 38 ATP per glucose, but real cells manage about 30Generations of students memorised that burning one glucose molecule yields 38 units of ATP, the cell's energy currency. Real cells fall short. Leaky membranes and the cost of shut…
1065. Human eggs lack centrioles, so the father's sperm must supply themA human egg carries no centrioles at all. At fertilisation the sperm contributes two structurally different ones, and they build the embryo's first centrosome, the hub that organi…
1066. Every leaf runs on a bacterium swallowed two billion years agoRoughly two billion years ago, an early complex cell engulfed a photosynthetic cyanobacterium, perhaps as a meal, and failed to digest it. The captive survived, kept making sugar …
1067. For 33 years scientists confidently miscounted human chromosomes as 48In 1923 Theophilus Painter peered through his microscope and counted 24 pairs of human chromosomes, 48 in all. Others repeated his figure for decades. Only in 1956 did the Indones…
1068. The inside of a cell may behave like liquid, jelly or glassCytoplasm looks like colourless goo, but physicists struggle to say what it is. It seems to flow like a liquid at scales under about 100 nanometres and act like a gel at larger on…
1069. Cells carry an internal scaffold that builds and dismantles itself constantlyEarly biologists dismissed the cytoskeleton as dull jelly holding organelles in place. It turned out to be a restless network of protein cables and tubes that shapes the cell, hau…
1070. Inside your cells, membranes stack up like a spiral parking garageZoom into the rough endoplasmic reticulum and you find flat double membranes piled on top of each other, joined by twisting helical ramps. The resemblance to a multistorey car par…
1071. Your cells spend energy pushing molecules uphill, against their natural flowLeft alone, molecules drift from crowded areas to emptier ones. Cells often need the reverse, hoarding glucose, amino acids and ions at high concentrations. Active transport makes…
1072. The first cells ever named were already dead, seen in a slice of corkRobert Hooke named cells in 1665 because the empty chambers in cork reminded him of monks' tiny rooms. What he saw were lifeless walls, revealing nothing of what cells contain. It…
1073. Each human cell packs about two metres of DNA into a six-micrometre nucleusStretched out, the DNA inside one human cell would reach roughly two metres. It fits inside a nucleus only about six micrometres across, wound around proteins called histones and …
1074. Glowing bacteria taught scientists that microbes take a headcount before actingThe marine bacterium Aliivibrio fischeri only starts producing light once enough of its neighbours are around. Each cell releases a signalling molecule and senses how much others …
1075. Humans have far more than five senses, perhaps as many as 17Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch are just the famous ones. Your body also senses balance, the position of your limbs, pain, hunger, thirst and even rising blood pressure. Sp…
1076. Biologists cannot agree on what a species is, and count over two dozen definitionsSpecies is biology's most basic unit, yet nobody has pinned it down. One researcher listed about 24 competing definitions and a philosopher counted 26. Hybrids blur boundaries, ba…
1077. Aristotle sorted animals into bloodless and blooded on a Greek islandLong before Linnaeus, Aristotle spent time on Lesbos grouping creatures by traits such as live birth, egg-laying, four legs or warm bodies. He split animals into those with blood …
1078. Every child inherits roughly 60 brand-new mutations that neither parent carriedEach of your cells suffers around 10,000 bouts of oxidative DNA damage a day, and repair crews fix nearly all of it. The slips that survive become mutations. On average a child ar…
1079. Beatrix Potter studied fungi as well as writing about Peter RabbitThe creator of Peter Rabbit made serious contributions to the study of fungi. She joined a field that was long filed under botany, until a 1969 discovery showed fungi are closer r…
1080. Is an ant colony one creature or thousands? Biologists still argueA siphonophore looks and behaves like a single jellyfish, yet it is built from many semi-independent units called zooids. An ant nest has workers that never breed, much like body …

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