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The Incredible Capacity Of The Immune System

By age two, infants in the US can receive up to 20 vaccinations. In view of that, concerns had been raised that too many immunizations could overwhelm an infant's immune system. ...

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TheImmuneSystem
Medicine

A Little OCD In Me And Thee?

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) may not get as much attention as learning disorders such as dyslexia and ADHD, but its rate of occurrence (about 2 to 3 percent) makes it more common than asthma or ... Continue reading

ALittleOCDInMeAndThee
Geology

Pangea

From about 280-230 million years ago, (Late Paleozoic Era until the Late Triassic) the continent we now know as North America was continuous with Africa, South America, and Europe. Pangea first began ... Continue reading

Pangea
Biology

Man-Eating Plants

What's for dinner? A bowl of salad greens, corn on the cob and strawberry shortcake for dessert. And it's not just us, most animals and insects love to munch, crunch and dine on plants. But there is a ... Continue reading

ManEatingPlants
Engineering

High Altitude

Have you ever read the directions on a box of cake mix? There are special instructions for high-altitude baking. Has anyone who visited the Rocky Mountains told you how hard it was to breathe there? ... Continue reading

HighAltitude

Poincare's Chaos

PoincaresChaosOver two hundred years after Newton published his laws of planetary motion the King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway sponsored a most unusual competition that would discover a whole new science.

Competition promised a cash prize to a scientist that would answer this question: ‘How Stable is the Solar System?’. Contestants would basically have to use Newton’s laws of gravitation to mathematically show the stability of our solar system. Applying Newton’s equations was easy for two bodies, say the Sun and Earth, however as soon as one added a third body, say the Moon, the problem would become so complicated that even the best physicists and mathematicians of the time were not able to compute anything. They were not even able to predict the three bodies’ trajectories of motion. This so called ‘three-body problem’ was therefore at the heart of this competition.

The prize was awarded ultimately to Jules Henri Poincare, one of the France’s leading mathematical physicists, even though he did not completely solve the problem and furthermore he showed what everybody was expecting the least. With his elegant math he showed that the three-body system behaved in a complex and totally unpredictable way. The Solar System, or at least his three-body approximation, was not stable at all, it was chaotic! Small changes in the initial conditions (such as planets positions and initial velocities) produced huge and unpredictable outcomes. His findings were ground stones for what we today know as chaos theory.