The science 2023, March

The American press has finally found the culprit for the recent inglorious fall of Kabul and the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan: global warming. It turns out that it ruined the Afghan peasants, which is why they went to the Taliban. However, real data from US government agencies show something quite different. Anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions have given a strong positive impetus to Afghan agriculture. However, in the future, global warming may indeed strengthen the Taliban as well

A scientist from Germany came to the conclusion that in the near future the network of global ocean currents will slow down to critical levels. This will affect the climate in Europe and America, as well as the ecosystem of the Atlantic Ocean

Before mass thermonuclear power engineering 20 years - and always will be 20 years. This simple joke itself became old 20 years ago. Society is upset that thermonuclear still cannot be brought to an industrial level. And only Elon Musk believes that a thermonuclear reactor is not needed at all. A careful analysis shows that he is right. Even if all the technical problems of thermonuclear energy are miraculously resolved, it will have no chance of ousting competitors. How did it happen, and what then cn

Our forests are on fire again, media reported. In appearance, everything is clear: the forest is dying and will soon die completely. If not for one "but": according to scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, the biomass of our forests has grown by almost 39% over 26 years. And this is an absolutely inconceivable, record increase - which, of course, does not negate the damage from fires for settlements. Who to believe: the smoke of fires from the pages of the media or scientists? And why is the authorities' fight against fires likely to make the situation worse? Let's try to figure it out

Young people's IQ levels have been declining since the 1990s, and this process may not be stopped. Some people blame smartphones with TVs for everything. Others point to negative selection for intelligence. We are figuring out whether civilization will have time to close the issue before the average IQ of Homo sapiens falls to the level of mental retardation

At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Anatoly Chubais suggested that Russia "bite its teeth" into the production of hydrogen, since it can be sent to Europe through the already existing pipes for natural gas. The former chairman of the board of Rusnano rightly considers hydrocarbon fuel to be deprived of special prospects in Western markets. But here's the bad luck: physical and technical reasons make the implementation of "hydrogen Russia" extremely undesirable. We figure out why

Experiments carried out by American physicists made it possible to classify the knots formed by shaking a box of wires and create a model of their formation

We breathe in and absorb chunks of microplastics all the time, so the suggestion to get rid of their large source looks like a good one. Alas, in reality everything is not so simple: let's try to show why

The first and second films of the cycle were quite plausible from the point of view of science. They did not contradict too much physics or even banal logic. Unfortunately, all subsequent parts of the franchise are extremely far from the level of the first two - and the sixth was no exception. Below we will explain why

There was a time when even NASA did not know if a person could eat in zero gravity. Fortunately for the members of future long-term missions, astronaut John Glenn has proven that this is indeed possible. In 1962, aboard the Friendship 7 spacecraft, an American squeezed applesauce from a metal tube into his mouth through a hole in his spacesuit

The news of the "decryption" of the Voynich manuscript made a lot of noise. It's time to figure out exactly what the new study was

Is it ethical to invade the human body? There are people who do not ask such questions, but happily take every opportunity to become the best version of themselves

Everybody knows that smoking is dangerous to health: public service advertisements and frightening illustrations on cigarette packs remind of this every now and then. Despite this, the number of smokers is declining very slowly. Even those who genuinely want to quit smoking face difficulties - all because quitting smoking is really difficult. Let's figure out which methods of quitting tobacco are most effective from the point of view of scientists

In its most widespread modification, string theory states that the universe exists in ten dimensions, but six of them we cannot perceive. What might these extra dimensions look like?

Human life is inextricably linked with time. We are used to measuring the course of processes with it - and it is also necessary for our survival. But is this phenomenon a fundamental property of reality, or is time emergent?

Car owners all over the world know: if it's very cold outside, especially if it's freezing, then the engine of your favorite car must first be warmed up. However, today this has no relation to reality and has become only a relic that has survived from the days of carburetor engines

Is Virtual Reality (VR) just a high-tech toy for gamers? Doctors are willing to argue. Technologies that immerse a person in an artificially created world are used in many areas of medicine - from surgery to rehabilitation of patients after a stroke

The roar of rockets going into space, giant pillars of fire, a colossal force that exceeds the force of gravity. The afterburner roar of combat aircraft. The loudest and most powerful human power device. All of this is a channel of a special form and special properties that radically changed humanity. What is its essence and how the difficult birth of supersonic occurs - read in our material

Some say that there are millions of tons of nuclear waste in the world and that they will never be safely buried, in connection with which Greenpeace closes the railways along which nuclear materials are transported, and demands to wind down the entire nuclear industry overnight. Others argue that real nuclear waste from nuclear power plants around the world is placed in a cube with a side of ten meters. How to understand who is right and who is wrong? And why is what for some “waste” is viewed by others as a valuable investment in the future? Popr

Several years ago, there was a buzz in the press about the case of Snezhana Pavlovic from Belgrade, who was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after her Facebook post did not arouse the interest of her friends. Doctors called this case "Snezhana's syndrome"

Huge speeds and instant transformations, mysterious harmony of forms and errors in calculations - everything is mixed in this picture. A foggy cone suddenly appears around the rapidly speeding plane, but this is not a "sound barrier". There are many incorrect stamps and common myths associated with the cone. The aerodynamics of the fog cone is interesting, and it is interesting to understand how it arises and why it looks like this. No one has ever made it out the way we do

Black holes seem to us to be something distant, about which they sometimes make films or write in books. We rarely think about what would happen if a miniature black hole one millimeter in diameter appeared on the surface of our planet. About this - in our material

Although the press writes a lot about the extremely rare "side effects" of vaccines, practice shows that one should be afraid of something completely different. The worst enemy of the vaccinated remains … the coronavirus. Even after vaccines, Pfizer or Moderna sometimes die from it - and there are already hundreds of similar cases. Of course, among the unvaccinated there are orders of magnitude more, but this does not make it easier for the dead and their family members. To make matters worse, two out of three Russian vaccines appear to be far less protective against covid than Pfizer and Moderna. It's pretty

“The planet is the cradle of reason, but one cannot live in the cradle forever,” wrote Konstantin Tsiolkovsky at the beginning of the 20th century. Today, scientists are increasingly talking about the fact that sooner or later people will have to leave Earth and go in search of a new home. Many are sure that we should look for it from other stars, to which we will get thousands, or even tens of thousands of years. We are talking about one of the attempts to solve this problem - about the hypothetical project of the "ship of generations"

Neutrino astronomy is very young - it is only about two decades old. Scientists believe that the study of the smallest and very difficult to detect particles can give us new information about much larger objects that we could not have received otherwise

Musk is versatile. The American entrepreneur has given life to many projects in various fields, each of which, if successful, can change the life of mankind. Neuralink stands out even among these projects. If we succeed in realizing it, not only the world around us will change, but also we ourselves. But will it be possible?

We are confident that free will exists. But the more this question is investigated, the more often neuroscientists are inclined to believe that this is nothing more than a trick of our brain

If you think that prejudices are unusual for you, then you are probably subject to them. If you think that cognitive distortions (that is, systematic errors in thinking) are not about you, therefore, one of these distortions is sitting in you - called "naive realism": the tendency to perceive your opinion as objective, and the opinion of others as full of cognitive distortion. What mistakes of thinking are there? There are a lot of them - psychologists identify more than a hundred. We will tell you about the most interesting

In the summer of 1950, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks received a letter from a sergeant who served on Sakhalin. The author wrote that he knew how to make a hydrogen bomb. Well, and a thermonuclear reactor too, so as not to get up twice

When you see a green apple, can you conclude that all crows are black? If the Sun did not shine as brightly 4 billion years ago as it does now, why did the Earth's oceans of that era not freeze? These and other paradoxes continue to excite lovers of logic and science

The special theory of relativity, which at the beginning of the last century overturned generally accepted ideas about the world, still continues to excite the minds and hearts of people. Today we will try to figure out together what it is

What will cars look like in fifty or a hundred years? While futuristic artists and decorators of films about the future are actively fantasizing, we will try to reflect on what is already there and on real perspectives

Among the most important technologies in human history, computers are perhaps the most recent invention. However, the need for calculations has existed since ancient times. Already the first agricultural civilizations of Mesopotamia were faced with such volumes of numbers and data, which were too difficult to store and recount in the mind. Then the first prototype of the computer appeared - the abacus

The past century has been rich in visiting aliens. But none of them affected human minds more than the Roswell incident. The alleged UFO crash near the American city of Roswell has turned into one of the greatest mysteries of American history, and also spawned an entire subculture

Physical phenomena that do not recognize any speed limits

Sitting behind the wheel and going out onto the road, we find ourselves under the watchful eye of the cameras of photo and video recording of violations. It is probably difficult to find at least one driver who has never received a "letter of happiness" from the traffic police. Today we will figure out how cameras for automatic recording of traffic violations work and why they sometimes make mistakes

Let's talk about the origin of life on Earth and chemical evolution. No chemical formulas

Never before has science been able to boast of such colorful images of astronomical objects. We are fascinated by the spectacular beauty of galaxies and nebulae in Hubble's photographs. We are amazed at the images of the incredible planets discovered by Kepler. If ever our descendants manage to get close to these amazing objects, will they see with their own eyes what we see in NASA photographs?

We live on a small planet near a small star in a giant galaxy, which nevertheless itself is lost in the incredible vastness of the Universe. Almost everything that is in space is very far from us, and some objects are separated from us by an unimaginable distance

The New Testament is the main source of information about Jesus Christ, but the gospels lack important information about his life. In what year was he born, in what he died, was he married? Historians try to provide answers to these and other important questions