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Rainbows
The simple magic of their shape and colors still puzzles
Flying Car
A long-standing dream
Love
Large brains may have led to the evolution of amour
Digital Audio Player
Mobile music rocked the record industry
Asteroids
The small fry of the solar system have troubled pasts
Batteries
Their inventor may not have known how they actually work
External Ears
They guide sound to the sensitive middle ear
Insurance
Its probability-based view of misfortunes helped to shape the scientific outlook
Scotch Tape
Most new inventions quickly fall into oblivion; some stick
Antibiotics
These wonder-drug molecules might have evolvedto help bacteria speak with their neighbors, not kill them
Artificial Heart
Did the wrong man get credit for the world’s first permanent pump?
Coriolis Effect
The earth’s spin influences hurricanes but not toilets
Ball Bearings
Cheap steel was key to allowing the routine design of parts that rolled against one another
Teeth
They long predate the smile
Egg
The answer to the age-old riddle is biologically obvious
Cancer
When a cell’s controls break down, chaos is unleashed
The Stirrup
Invention of the stirrup may rival that of the longbow and gunpowder
LSD
An inquisitive Swiss chemist sent himself on the first acid trip
Cooking
Preparing foods with fire may have made us humans what we are
Clocks
Their origin is one of the deepest questions in modern physics
Legs, Feet and Toes
The essential parts for walking on land evolved in water
Paper Money
A substitute for coins turned into a passport for globalization
The Vibrator
One of the first electrical appliances made its way into the home as a purported medical device
Buckyballs and Nanotubes
A once overlooked form of carbon may represent the future of technology
Economic Thinking
Even apparently irrational human choices can make sense in terms of our inner logic
Carbon
Synonymous with life, it was born in the heart of stars
The Placenta
An eggshell membrane evolved into the organ that lets fetuses grow in the womb
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Graphical Perspective
“Realistic” imagery depends on relatively recent cultural assumptions and technical skills
The Paper Clip
Despite its shortcomings, the iconic design will likely stick around
Anthrax
Solving the riddle of its lethal contagion modernized the understanding of disease
Intermittent Windshield Wipers
A now routine automotive feature pitted an individual inventor against the entire industry
The Eye
What was half an eye good for? Quite a lot, actually
Diamond
Its hardness is natural; its value is not
The Pill
Infertility treatments led to reproductive liberation
The Mechanincal Loom
Programmable textile machinery provided inspirationfor the player piano and the early computer
Mad Cow Disease
Cannibalism takes its revenge on modern farms
Photosynthesis
The reaction that makes the world green is just one of many variants
The Blueprint
A failure for photography, it was long irreplaceable for duplicating house plans
Feathers
Barbs became plumes long before birds took wing—in fact, long before birds
Bone
Structure, strength and storage in one package
AIDS and HIV
Religious Thought
Belief in the supernatural may have emerged from the most basic components of human cognition
Recorded Music
The first recordings remained silent for 150 years
The Color Blue
The natural pigment was once a “precious” color
Facial Expressions
Our unique expressiveness may have a three-million-year-old pedigree
Gamma Rays
To create one typically means you have to destroy something, be it a single particle or an entire star
Light
It emerged not with a quick flip of the switch but with a slow breaking of the dawn
Chocolate
Mixing the bitter treat with milk was the popular breakthrough
Internal-Combustion Engine
Still powering the world’s vehicle fleet 130 years on
Cupcakes
The yummy baked good is one of America’s first and finest contributions to world cuisine
Appendix
Not needed, but not useless
The Web
The global information resource spun out of research into fundamental physics
Tectonic Plates
The long, strange trip of continental drift
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19 Comments
Add Comment"Everything started somewhere."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is an assumption.
While the human mind may have trouble grasping that something may exist now which never had a beginning, is it not possible for the universe, or the soup of elementary particles from which it was born, to have existed for all eternity?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is certainly possible that matter or elementary particles existed for all eternity, but even if this is so it doesn't explain how eternally existing matter somehow attained form and order. It seems strange beyond chance that out of chaos and blind force emerged: intelligence, life, and order.
If you assume eternally existing matter as a possibility, an infinite number of states for that matter is the next logical step.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGood answer!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've no problem supposing 'intelligence, life and order' to have arisen out of chaos. Given ktulu's point of an infinite number of states, that life or intelligence might never have evolved would be the more difficult to position to uphold.
NB: It doesn't take much to see that on earth there's plenty of disorder and absence of intelligence.
Matter per se did not exist, eternally or otherwise.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEnergy, on the other hand, is the precursor of matter.
Therefore the question should be phrased: "Did energy's existence have a beginning?"
Undergoing quantum processes energy became matter. This matter can be made to return, at least partially, to its energy state by removing part(s) of the atom's nucleus or by colliding smaller particles, as is done in particle colliders. Up to now, however, we have not been able to convert energy into matter.
As to whether energy has existed eternally, the only way this can be said is if we assume a pre-Big Bang state. Then what we see is that the Big Bang was just the transfer of that energy from whatever dimension it came from into our current universe.
In the begining there was zero!,a state of absolutely nothing.If this were not true,the universe we know is here,would not of had a place to expand in too.Now the great mystery begins.In an infinite numbers of possibilitys the universe and god are some.The question is,which came first?Now we know for sure the universe is here,but there is no proof that god exist,then again there is no proof that god doesn't.So we must in the end,follow the truth,and what we can prove through experiment,because if there is a god that's what god would want us to do,and if there isn't a god it's what's we should do anyway.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Origins section sub-article "Graphical Perspective" warns us that "'Realistic' imagery depends on relatively recent cultural assumptions and technical skills."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell, it is true that it seems to have taken the human race oh, say, 50,000 years to come up with vanishing point-based perspective. But the implication that this is somehow arbitrary--that an alien from another planet might not be able to visually parse our images--is based on its own questionable assumptions.
First, did you notice that cameras produce images with the same perspective? What kind of cultural assumptions does a camera lens have?
Second--along with the camera lens--paired eyes designed to face in the same direction at rest produce the same perspective on the back of an eyeball. All sight hunters and arboreal creatures that jump from branch to branch have this, since they require stereo vision to survive.
Coincidentally, stereo vision is also required for the precise manipulation of materials characteristic of all technological societies.
So although we'll never prove or disprove it conclusively, it is reasonable to assume that technological aliens probably have stereo eyesight that replicates single-point perspective in their brains.
The assumption that we can't assume anything whatsoever about aliens' vision and perspective is itself a cultural artifact, based on the dominance of "splitters" over "lumpers" in academic circles, general-purpose political correctness, and the cantina scene from Star Wars--along with rampant use of GGI in science-fiction movies, freeing us from "rubber suit and/or funny-forehead" aliens, but trapping us in a vast visual universe of imaginary aliens for which there are no plausible evolutionary models.
http://popzu.blogspot.com
The article under "Origins, The Start of Everything" entitled Cooking, Preparing Foods with Fire, containes the obvious error that Homo Erectus appeared 1.9 BILLION years ago. I assume editors will correct the error as soon as possible
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Origins article on Insurance that "asset backed securities borrowed a component from life insurance, the formula, called a Gaussian cupola." I believe the formulas correct name is Gaussian Copula.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI Really enjoyed the Origins Issue, thank you.
Kudos for this article -- it was very enjoyable. One typo: In Melinda Wenner's Origin of Cooking, I hope she did not mean to imply that Homo Erectus dates back 1.9 billion years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisD. Meyer
The Origins article "Coriolis Effect," addresses "water running down a drain....force...is far too weak to stir a small bowl of water...." Was it some kind of trick, then, that allowed various guides, in Africa and South America over the years, to "demonstrate" the effect at the equator with a small bowl of water?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRe the article on computer origins, what about the abacus?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe orgin of everything is everything else. origin is constant as change is constant. everyone just percieves it differently. just ask yourself which came first snakes or eggs?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is the origin of spell-check generated typos? Actuary Li's technique is a copula not a cupola. And by the way it's an urban legend that Li caused the financial meltdown. The financial pressures to produce those products were such that they would have been designed and priced copula or no, and the pressures were such that any technique that produced a very much higher price would have been rejected in favor of one that produced prices close to what Li's copula did. Finally, how does one write an article on the origins of digital computing without mentioning the name Turing? (Not for the abstract Turing machines, but for the physical ones he actually conceived and built during and just after WWII.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is the origin of spell-check generated typos? Actuary Li's technique is a copula not a cupola. And by the way it's an urban legend that Li caused the financial meltdown. The financial pressures to produce those products were such that they would have been designed and priced copula or no, and the pressures were such that any technique that produced a very much higher price would have been rejected in favor of one that produced prices close to what Li's copula did. Finally, how does one write an article on the origins of digital computing without mentioning the name Turing? (Not for the abstract Turing machines, but for the physical ones he actually conceived and built during and just after WWII.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThings can exist before the Big Bang if it was a mirror universe made of antimatter with time going in the opposite direction to ours. Diagramatically it is like an hour-glass with the Big Bang at the pinched in waist. If both exist for eternity there was always something.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn graphical perspective...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne of the weaknesses the article points out about painting in perspective is the assumption of one viewpoint. But computer graphics now enable us to shift the picture as the viewpoint shifts. Such "head tracking" can give absolutely stunning pseudo 3D effects because it taps into your brains rather advanced use of parallax and other visual cues.
Here's an example from SIGGRAPH a little over a year ago. Note that the rendering machine (a Sony PS3) uses a camera to track the viewer and then adjusts the rendered viewpoint to reflect any movement of the viewer's head.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYNTIyYIJBQ
CORIOLIS EFFECT - great articles UNTIL theCoriolis effect suddely became the Coriolis Force. This is SCIENTIFIC American, not Dr Phil!!!!! Thereis no oriolis force, merely a Corioli effect. Next thing we will have a Centrifugal Force!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEnd of paragraph three should probably read: " The motion reaches a steady state with te wind encircling the low-pressure area - the pressure gradent pushing inwards supplying sufficient centripetl force for the resulting circular motion.
If the pressure gradient pushed inward while the "Coriolis Force" outward, the resulting balance would mean the air would travel in a straight line- Newton's First law.
"EGG" Phenomenal, a MUST READ !
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