Science Magazine publishes daily news on the most interesting research outputs worldwide. Each year over a thousand news appear in Science and towards the end of the year the News Editors picks the 10 most interesting ones. A few selected items from this list are discussed by the editors in a podcast. In the 2020 podcast news editor David Grimm picked only…
Quanta Magazin, ranked as the world’s #1 science news portal, dedicated its November 19th article to the reserach project verifying Plato’s hypothesis about cubes and connecting it with the Gömböc. The story behind the reserach project is laid out by award-winning science writer Joshua Sokol. (Picture: title graphics “Cube World” in Quanta by Thomas Shahan.) The article has been republished by leading…
The world’s most cited scientific journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published an article by four scientists (three Hungarian, one American). The researchers bring mathematical, mechanical and geological arguments to vindicate Plato‘s theory according to which the Earth is made of cubes. The granite wall in the image above shows a fracture pattern which can…
The recently discovered interstellar asteroid ‘Oumuamua is currently traversing our Solar System. The hugely elongated shape (length ~400 m, width ~ 40 m) of the first-ever observed interstellar object is so bizarre that it made scientists (including Harvard’s Avi Loeb) wonder whether it may actually be a spaceship. Now a Hungarian team from the ELTE Gothard Astrophysical Observatory and…
A recent study published by Nature Communications uses the images taken by NASA‘s Curiosity rover to estimate the length of ancient Martian rivers. According to the study, these rivers extended beyond 30 miles up to the rim of Gale crater. This suggests that 3 billions years ago a large and sustained river system may have existed on Mars. The length of…
Natural History Magazine is published by the American Museum of Natural History, one of the world’s foremost collections in this field. The Magazine’s March 2009 issue contains an interesting paper entitled ‘The Living Gömböc’ on the connection between the Gömböc and some turtle species: certain tortoises developed Gömböc-shaped shells, enabling them to self-right, whereas turtles with flat shell use…
The study “Turtle Geometry” describing the self-righting behaviour of turtles, some of them using the ‘Gömböc method’ has been reported in several websites, e.g. Nature News, New Scientist, Toronto Star and Der Spiegel. Articles about the study: Video about the turtle shell geometry (in German): Video about a field experiment in pet shop: Original study…
