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Nautical mile explained
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Every ship sails a mile a minute. A nautical mile is one minute of arc measured along any meridian. In other words, a nautical mile is based on the circumference of the planet Earth. If you were to cut the Earth in half at the equator, you could pick up one of the halves and look at the equator as a circle. You could divide that circle into 360 degrees. You could then divide a degree into 60 minutes. A minute of arc on the planet Earth is 1 nautical mile. This unit of measurement is used by all nations for air and sea travel. ...
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70880 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
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17942 |
duddy |
8 years ago |
This carnivorous plant counts to avoid being tricked
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Unlike conventional plants, the Venus flytrap copes with poor soil by eating bugs! But the cost of insect hunting is high. Catching prey requires Dionaea muscipula to snap down quickly and then carry out the energy-intensive process of digestion. To balance the costs and benefits of eating meat, the plants have developed a counting system to identify real prey from false alarms, according to a new study. To understand how the flytrap distinguishes a potential food source from a false alarm like a raindrop, researchers observed the electrical and chemical response of the plant to touch stimulation. In order to mimic insect prey, the scientists stimulated the hairlike sensors located on the plant’s trap. Touching the sensors two times quick ...
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16812 |
duddy |
8 years ago |
All trees, regardless of size, break once this wind speed is reached
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The magic number is 42 m/s (94 mph). Using mathematical data and physical experiments, scientists say they have found the law that governs the resistance of wooden beams under stress. According to the study ( link), researchers hung weights from wooden rods and pieces of pencil lead to record the amount of force needed to snap the cylinder. As one might sense, they found that for a fixed length, increasing the diameter made the rods stronger: They could bend more before breaking. This would make tall skinny trees most vulnerable, but, as the team points out, trees don’t grow taller without getting disproportionately thicker as well. By incorporating established laws of tree allometry - which explain the relationship of tree size parameters ...
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12778 |
duddy |
8 years ago |
How the Turing machine works
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A Turing machine is a hypothetical machine thought of by the mathematician Alan Turing in 1936. Despite its simplicity, the machine can simulate ANY computer algorithm, no matter how complicated it is. Put simply, the Turing machine isn't a physical machine, but you can imagine it as an never-ending line of tape, broken down into squares. On each of those squares is a 1, a 0, or nothing at all. The machine reads one square at a time, and depending on what it reads, it performs an action - it either erases the number and writes a new one before moving on, or simply moves on to a different square. Each of those actions, which mathematicians call a 'state', are determined by the mathematical algorithm or problem the Turing machine has been desi ...
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4833 |
duddy |
7 years ago |
Simulating the evolution of aggression
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This video brings to life the evolution of aggresive behavior in a population, and its relation to game theory – the field of mathematics concerned with quantifying strategic behavior and decision-making. The author illustrates what happens in an artificial population of species that exhibit two entirely different strategies as they compete for resources. In the first strategy called ‘dove’, organisms are required to share their food source with the other if both happen to land at the same site after being randomly shuffled. Sharing your food source allows the organism to survive another cycle, but not reproduce, unless they’re fortunate enough to land at a site all by them self. The author shows that if this cooperative strategy is ...
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3680 |
duddy |
2 years ago |
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3485 |
bio_man |
10 years ago |
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