50YearOld

Most of us love listening to music a little bit louder than we should. Whether you’re running on the treadmill and want the volume up to motivate yourself or you’re fighting to get as close to the stage as you can at a concert, there’s something invigorating about loud music. But only when it’s music we want to hear.One nurse recently shared on Reddit that she was tormented by a nearby college blasting annoying music all day long in their parking lot. So instead of staying silent, she got petty revenge and altered a…

NASA this week marked the 50th anniversary of the total ban of civilian supersonic flights over the United States. The milestone comes as the agency continues with the development of the X-59 experimental supersonic aircraft intended to reintroduce civilian Mach+ service.On April 27, 1973, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed a new regulation that prohibited civilian aircraft from flying speeds beyond Mach One over the US land mass or territorial waters. The decision came in the wake of the 1968 Aircraft…

The study demonstrates that the creation of groups is not necessarily a result of social behavior, but can also be accounted for by individuals’ entirely self-interested motives to gain an advantage over others.A new study describes how selfishness can lead to fairness.Physicists have verified a fifty-year-old hypothesis that explains the formation of herds as a result of selfish behavior.“Surprisingly, when individuals act out of purely selfish reasons, this can lead to a fair situation within the group,” says physics…

“This is a really amazing result,” says François Le Gall, a mathematician at Nagoya University in Japan, who was not involved in the work. “Matrix multiplication is used everywhere in engineering,” he says. “Anything you want to solve numerically, you typically use matrices.” Despite the calculation’s ubiquity, it is still not well understood. A matrix is simply a grid of numbers, representing anything you want. Multiplying two matrices together typically involves multiplying the rows of one with the columns of the…

The goal here is to trace out triangles on top of these lines such that the triangles satisfy two requirements: First, no two triangles share an edge. (Systems that fulfill this requirement are called Steiner triple systems.) And second, ensure that every small subset of triangles utilizes a sufficiently large number of nodes.The way the researchers did this is perhaps best understood with an analogy.Say that instead of making triangles out of edges, you’re building houses out of Lego bricks. The first few buildings you…

A frozen Apollo 17 sample being processed inside a nitrogen-purged glove box at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The sample is one of many being studied as part of the Apollo Next Generation Sample Analysis Program (ANGSA) program. Credit: NASA/Robert MarkowitzScientists at <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>NASA</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space…