Stuff YOU Should Know
Uhlenbeck Wins World’s Greatest Math Prize Known as the “Nobel Prize of Mathematics,” the Abel Prize is the world’s most prestigious award in this field. It was founded in 2003 and is given each year by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters to an outstanding mathematician. And this year, for the first time ever, […]
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Can Bees Do Math? Have you ever wondered if animals can count? What about insects? If that sounds like a crazy idea, you’ll be surprised to hear that honeybees can count to four. Even more impressively, Australian scientists have recently discovered that they may also understand the concept of zero. Here’s what happened. Scientists in […]
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Hurricane Harvey: Recovery Efforts Begin More than a week after Hurricane Harvey first made landfall in Texas, many areas are still heavily flooded. Some south Texas towns are suffering from high bacteria levels in their water, rendering it undrinkable. Hospitals and schools have had to close; in fact, ten to twelve thousand Houston students will […]
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Standoff in Oregon Ends Last month, btw brought you news of the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon by a group protesting federal land rights. Many of the residents of Harney Country, while generally sympathetic to the cause of the so-called “Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, had become displeased by the ongoing disruption to […]
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Jonas Hits East Coast Fourteen states around the country got more than a foot of snow this month, with at least six states on the East Coast seeing more than two feet of powder. Much of it came over the weekend of January 22-24 from Winter Storm Jonas. For many of the areas affected, it […]
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Robotic Cars Face Experimental Ethics A couple of years ago, btw brought you a story about driverless cars. Spearheaded by Google X, the experimental division of the giant technology company, the Self-Driving Car (SDC) is equipped with “lidar” (a blending of the words “light” and “radar”). Lidar is a type of technology that measures distance […]
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Celebrating Pi (With Pie!) Do you like math? Do you like baked goods? If so, you hopefully celebrated both on International Pi Day on March 14. Pi–symbolically represented as π–is a “special number” (or mathematical constant) that is represented by the Greek letter for the letter P. Its approximate value is 3.14 (although it an […]