This is completely unfair, especially given the fact that the cosmos absolutely knows what it is doing. From a physics perspective, there are some very attractive, promising theories that begin to answer the question above, but we don't know and may never know which one is right. Perhaps it was born from an inherently unstable “nothing”. You should know that the void is not actually empty; matter and energy are spontaneously born and died in it, at least in the form of quantum fluctuations. Perhaps our universe is not the only one of its kind, but one of an almost infinite number. Perhaps this is all just... Much of our ignorance comes down to the fact that we are still waiting for the next generation of cosmic measurements that will confirm or disprove the latest theories, and we also need more flexible and comprehensive theories, not just mathematical elegance. In general, we don’t know why all this exists or happens at all. Usually the “why” always exists.
We don't know what dark matter and dark energy are
Big problems indicate even bigger problems. Ordinary matter, the stuff from which we, planets, stars, and bologna sandwiches are made, makes up about 4.9% of all the matter that fills the Universe. 26.8% of matter is “dark,” and we know this because, on large scales, cosmic material moves faster than it should, and galaxies behave as if they are controlled by a huge mass of particles we cannot see. And we have no idea what these particles are. This is bad, but the situation is even worse with dark energy. Something is causing the universe to expand faster and faster. It shouldn't be this way. In the period up to 5 or 6 billion years ago after the Big Bang, the expansion of the universe was stable, but something intervened, some invisible component, perhaps something like dense vacuum energy that fills space as it grows. What is this? We do not know. We have a lot of guesses, and it's not a bad idea to guess about 68.3% of the universe.
We don't know if there is life anywhere else
This question is incredibly interesting because events can be assumed and located regardless of the answer. Here we are, creatures on a planet full of thriving life, carefully adapting to the physical and chemical conditions of life over the past 5 billion years. We also know that there are an awful lot of planets in the universe, and many of them could also harbor life. However, we don't know for sure whether we are alone. And no clues. This is problem. It's a good problem to have, as I said, regardless of the answer, but few people bother to try to find an answer to this question. Although too much may depend on its resolution.
We probably don't fully understand the quantum world
Indeed, our current quantum physics in theory (and in practice) works wonders, describing atoms and molecules along with the bizarre nature of entanglement and qubits. But this does not mean that we are quantum mech gurus. Quite the contrary. One need only read summaries on quantum issues to realize that the most fundamental aspects of the quantum nature of the universe still cause headaches and controversy. People keep coming up with formulations of how quantum mechanics defines us, or doesn't define us. The problem gets worse when quantum physics enters the realm of soft, warm, wet biology. Not to mention black holes and .
We don't understand our own biology
It is no exaggeration to say that we do not understand how each of our parts works. If we understood (and we are moving in this direction), we would cope with disease, death, begin to grow limbs and restore memory. We could master genetic engineering at the level of demigods and figure out how to make the brain work hundreds of times faster. If you need good example our ignorance, let there be microflora. There's a joke that if aliens find us, they won't know who to talk to: the bacteria that inhabit us, or us? Ten trillion human cells are supplemented, used, saturated with hundreds of trillions of microbes - we carry around a kilogram of bacteria and archaea with us and cannot live without them. They are in our guts, lungs, noses, everywhere. We're just cruise ships for germs.
We don't know how the Earth works
Let's dive deeper. Neither man nor robot, no one has gone further into the Earth than a few kilometers; everyone else knows about probes and physical analyzes that are far from the essence of the matter. It took us ridiculously too long to figure out that the skin of our planet is constantly moving: plate tectonics was not generally accepted until the mid-20th century. We're still not sure how the internal dynamo works, how rolls of convecting magma generate our planet's magnetic field. At the same time, so many events have happened in geophysics over 4.5 billion years that some of the sources of our best information about the origin of the planet arrive with meteorites and hide in the craters of other worlds. We don't even know for sure where the Moon came from. Maybe there was a giant collision, maybe not. For supposedly intelligent creatures on a small rocky planet, this complete failure.
We cannot prove or solve many of our own mathematical hypotheses and problems
If mathematicians think they can escape this festival of ignorance, let's just remind ourselves that we have a long list of unproven, unsolved problems and unproven hypotheses. With all this, we still haven’t decided exactly how accurately mathematics describes the world and whether mathematics is built into the very foundation of the universe.
We don't know how to make artificial intelligence
Let's mention this because it's a perennial problem. Also because we often write about the development of artificial intelligence (or its pathetic attempts to get on its feet). Ultimately, the attempt to create artificial intelligence is an attempt to understand ourselves. Because in order to create something artificial, you need to know how the original works. Although our machines have come a long way, it is still unclear whether services like the YouTube search engine or other big name can work in the same way as the emergence of ideas in our heads. Will the machine be able to think at all - that is the question.
Conclusions? There is a ton we don't know (much more than the examples in this article). But there is no point in becoming discouraged, and ignorance is not strength. In the end, the thirst to discover and the desire to think launched the flywheel of science, and the Universe is the most complex riddle in the history of mankind. Perhaps hundreds more years will pass, and we will never know anything.
Curious facts in nature
On March 29, 1848, Niagara Falls stopped for 30 hours due to ice jams on Niagara.
The most rain occurs on the mountain on Wai al-al, in Hawaii. There are 350 rainy days a year, during which time more than 10,000 mm of precipitation falls.
The most precipitation per day falls in the Indian Ocean - 1800 mm. To compare, in Moscow, for example, about 700 mm falls per year.
In May 1948, two New Zealand volcanoes, Mt.Ruapehu and Mt.Ngauruhoe, erupted simultaneously.
In Uganda, thunderstorms have been observed on average 250 days per year in recent decades. This is the most thunderous place on the planet.
The pressure at the center of the Earth is 3 million times higher than the pressure in the Earth's atmosphere.
No two snowflakes have exactly the same crystal structure.
Over the past 300 years, humans have destroyed 66% of all forests on Earth.
Every year, thunderstorms bring more than 10 million tons of nitrogen to Earth.
Every year there are about 50,000 earthquakes on Earth.
The most a big wave, ever recorded by humans, was observed near the Japanese island of Ishigaki in 1971. It had a height of 85 meters.
The largest hailstone was spotted in Kansas, USA; it weighed 700 grams.
The most low temperature on the surface of the Earth was recorded at the Vostok station in Antarctica: -89.2 C.
The sharpest drop in temperature was observed in the state of Montana, USA, on January 23-24, 1916. The temperature dropped from +6.7 C to -48.8, i.e. at 55.5 degrees!
The sunniest place on Earth is the Dead Sea, there are about 330 sunny days a year! And the least sun is observed on the Russian Severnaya Zemlya archipelago - there is sun only 12 days a year.
In females, a sharp increase in temperature was recorded in Spearfish, USA. Within two minutes the temperature rose by 27.2 degrees, from -20 to +7.2!!!
The heaviest snowfall on record in weather recording occurred in California in the mid-20th century. On one of the mountains, about 5 meters of snow fell in 6 days of continuous snowfall!
A temperature of -40 degrees Celsius is equal to a temperature of -40 degrees Fahrenheit. This is the only temperature that is the same on these two scales.
The Izalco volcano in El Salvador erupts every 8 minutes and has produced more than 12 million eruptions over its two-hundred-year history.
A thunderstorm occurs in Egypt once every 200 years.
The length of the orbit in which the Earth moves around the Sun is 23 thousand times greater than the length of the Earth's equator.
Opals and amethyst gemstones have the same chemical formula as river sand, and ruby has a white clay formula.
Earth and air are inseparable. If the atmosphere of our planet did not move with the Earth, then it would be very simple and fast to travel. In that case, it would be enough to rise above earth's surface in a balloon and descend when the desired area of the Earth is not under the balloon.
The soil of the island of Kimolos in the Aegean Sea consists of a greasy soapy substance that the local inhabitants of the island have used as soap since ancient times. They can be used to bathe and wash clothes. When it rains, the entire island is covered in soap foam.
About 1 million different chemical compounds can be obtained from oil, and “only” 400 thousand from coal.
Quartz is the most common mineral on our planet.
The islands of Lombok and Bali are only 15 miles apart. The depth of the strait separating the two islands is only 340 meters at its deepest point. But despite the close proximity, the fauna on these two islands is completely different - animals, and even fish and birds! As one scientist aptly notes, these islands differ in their wildlife more than England from Japan. The faunal boundary separating the two islands, as well as animal world Indian Ocean and Asia from the fauna of the Australian region, was named the Wallace line in honor of the English naturalist who discovered it in 1892.
The area of Saint-Michel in France twice a day by an island and twice by a peninsula. This is due to the strong tides in this part of the Atlantic Ocean.
Lightning is useful. They manage to snatch millions of tons of nitrogen from the air, “bind” it and send it into the ground. This free fertilizer enriches the soil in which grains grow.
The North Pole of the Earth is warmer than the South Pole.
The small island of El Alacran, off the coast of Chile, is one of the largest bird colonies on the planet. There are more than a million cormorants, gulls and other birds, whose screams are drowned out even by the roar of the ocean surf.
Almost all islands in the Atlantic Ocean owe their origin to volcanoes.
The largest part of the world by area is Asia (43.5 million square kilometers), the smallest is Australia (together with Oceania, about 9 million square kilometers).
The largest atlas in the world is located in Berlin, in the German state library. It weighs approximately 250 kg and measures 1.70 x 2.20 meters. In this invaluable exhibit from a scientific point of view, you can get acquainted with cartographic art XVII centuries.
The largest volcano in the world is located on the Japanese island of Kiu Shiu and is called Aso. The length of the crater of this volcano reaches 23 kilometers, width - 14 kilometers, depth - 500 meters.
Tarif is an island in the Mediterranean Sea where port parking fees were first charged
Black color accumulates heat, white reflects it.
A little over a century ago, aluminum was mined in kilograms. 1 kilogram cost as much as 500 rubles in gold! From 1855 to 1899, aluminum prices decreased 500 times!
The Earth's atmosphere weighs about 5,300,000,000,000,000 tons. If, for example, it were necessary to transport a cargo equal to the weight of the earth’s atmosphere from Moscow to Leningrad, and if each train had 100 cars and covered the entire journey in 10 hours, then it would take almost 4 billion years to transport this cargo.
Thanks to the water cycle in nature, 511 thousand cubic kilometers (!) of water rise from the Earth’s surface into the atmosphere every year. 411 thousand cubic kilometers rise from the surface of the ocean alone.
More than half of the world's population has never seen snow in person - only in photographs or on video.
In the town of Tegazi, which is located in the Sahara Desert, there are houses with walls made of rock salt. This is one of the driest places on the planet, leaving houses in no danger of being dissolved by the rain.
A unique deposit of pure iron has been discovered in Greenland. After the volcanic eruption, the ore, along with magma, passed through a layer of coal and was restored. This is very similar to a domain process.
In Death Valley, the driest and hottest place on globe, lives over 15 species of birds, 40 species of mammals, 44 species of reptiles, 12 species of amphibians, 13 species of fish and 545 species of plants.
In Kazakhstan there is an ancient well that predicts the weather. Before precipitation, it draws air in, and on a fine sunny day, on the contrary, it pushes the air out. If on such a day you throw some item of clothing into a well, it will fly back out before reaching the water. The well-phenomenon has served the local shepherds as a natural barometer since ancient times.
The map of Indonesia often needs to be amended, especially to the outline of the coastline. Where the islands that make up Indonesia are located, volcanoes constantly occur, some islands submerge in the water, others suddenly or gradually emerge from it.
There are 31,557,600 seconds in one year.
There were 365,250 days in the first millennium. In the second - 365,237. In the third there will be 365,242 days.
In the Atacama Desert on the American coast, no more than 8 millimeters of precipitation falls per year. It is so dry there that the corpses of dead animals dry out there and do not rot for several decades.
In the Sahara, approximately 160 thousand mirages of various kinds are recorded every year. There are even special maps of caravan routes, where places where mirages are often observed are marked. These maps indicate where oases, palm groves, wells, and mountains appear.
On average, 3 earthquakes occur in Japan per day: “For breakfast, lunch and dinner,” the Japanese say jokingly. True, most of them are noted only by instruments and are not noticeable to humans.
Spring moves at a speed of approximately 50 kilometers per day. This was determined by observing the inflorescence of individual plants.
Echo is the reflection of an air wave. If the sound-reflecting wall is located at a distance of less than 30 meters, then the echo does not occur.
There is a place on the Rhine River where an echo repeats a word twenty times.
In France, the city of Verdun has two towers located 60 meters apart. If you shout while standing between them, the echo will be heard 12 times.
The well-known Ear of Dionysius is a huge grotto carved into the rocks, and indeed similar to a human ear. If you rustle the entrance to the grotto with a piece of paper, the echo will be heard from the depths of a cannon shot.
The world's longest echo can be heard in the Mausoleum Chapel building in Hamilton (Lancashire, England). It lasts a full 15 seconds.
There are many unsolved mysteries in the world that people encounter every day. For example, scientists still have not deciphered Peto's paradox, have not determined the origin of flowers, and do not know the origin of the Ebola virus. Our review contains questions that the best scientific minds are still struggling with today.
1. Butterfly migration
How thousands of fragile Monarch butterflies manage to fly from Canada to Mexico remains a mystery to scientists. After all, during the flight, several generations of these insects change, but from year to year they stop on the same trees along the way and fly to the same place.
2. The mystery of Loricifera
There are at least a hundred species of these tiny invertebrates, but none of them are found in fossils.
3. Plankton paradox
In hydrobiology, the plankton paradox is a situation in which a limited range of resources supports unexpected wide range planktonic species. This is completely contrary to the principle of competitive exclusion, which suggests that when two species compete for the same resource, then one of the species is doomed to extinction.
4. Origin and place of origin of Ebola
Despite the fact that people have already learned a lot about the Ebola virus, no one knows where exactly this virus originated and where it “hides” between outbreaks of epidemics.
5. Perception
Although people perceive things around them all the time, the act of perception itself still remains an unsolved mystery. Scientists simply cannot understand how the brain transforms sensory information into coherent perception.
6. Alkaloids
Alkaloids are a group of natural chemical compounds that are predominantly composed of nitrogen atoms. They are produced by a variety of organisms, including bacteria, fungi, plants and animals. However, their function is not entirely clear to the scientific community.
7. The structure of a hammerhead shark
The hammerhead shark is known for its unusual head shape. However, scientists cannot understand the reason for this shark's head shape. Some suggest that it evolved to increase the electrosensory area of the fish, another hypothesis suggests that it improves the coverage of the visual area, and a third says that a similar head shape was developed to improve aquadynamic properties.
8. Fairy circles (Africa)
For several years now, there has been debate about the reason for the emergence of such lifeless circles in Africa. Research has shown that some of them can be explained by the activity of the sand termite Psammotermes allocerus, but there is no single theory that explains all the fairy tale circles.
9. Function of DNA
People still don't know what the vast majority of human DNA is responsible for. For a long time it was believed that about 98% of the human genome is simply empty and does not carry any encoded information. Nobody knew what function it performed. However, in Lately scientists began to doubt this theory.
10. Secrets of human consciousness
People do not know what consciousness is and what makes a person aware of himself. Why do many animals, especially mammals, dream and have dreams? What are the characteristics of intelligence? There are no answers to these questions.
11. Evolution of colors
Most people enjoy looking at flowers as well as their smell. But no one knows how flowers evolved. It was previously believed that flowers originated from gymnosperms (a group of seed plants that includes conifers, cycads, ginkgos and ginkgos), but recent molecular studies have shown that this hypothesis is untenable.
12. Peto's paradox
It's no secret that people are predisposed to cancer, but it turns out that such large mammals, like whales, practically do not get cancer. It would seem that the whale is much larger than a person, it has many more cells. Accordingly, he should have a higher chance of developing a malignant cell. But that's not true.
13. Cambrian Explosion
What caused the rapid diversification of metazoans at the beginning of the Cambrian period, which led to the emergence of almost all modern types of animals? This is one of the most discussed topics among scientists, but there is not only an answer to this question, but even a unified theory.
14. Biological aging
There are a number of hypotheses for why people age and eventually die... but they are just hypotheses.
15. Origin of life
And, of course, the biggest mystery for scientists is the origin of life on Earth! Despite all the latest scientific and technological advances, no one knows exactly how and when life arose on Earth.
Despite all the achievements of science, there are still many blind spots in it. New Scientist magazine published a list of mysterious phenomena that scientists are unable to explain.
1. Placebo effect
Incredible, but true: seriously ill patients are relieved of pain with morphine, and then one day the morphine is replaced with saline. What's happening? Saline solution also relieves pain. This is the placebo effect: somehow a compound out of nothing can have a very powerful effect. Doctors have known about the placebo effect for a long time. But other than the fact that it apparently has a biochemical nature, we know nothing. One thing is clear: the mind can influence the biochemistry of the body.
2. Horizon problem
Our Universe is inexplicably unified. Look at space from one end of the visible Universe to the other, and you will see that the background microwave radiation in space has the same temperature throughout. This doesn't seem surprising until you remember that these two edges are 28 billion light years apart, and our Universe is only 14 billion years old.
Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so it is impossible for thermal radiation to travel between the two horizons and balance the hot and cold zones created during the Big Bang, establishing the thermal equilibrium we see today.
From a scientific point of view, the same background radiation temperature is an anomaly. It could be explained by recognizing that the speed of light is not constant. But even in this case, we are still powerless to face the question: why?
3. Ultra-energy cosmic rays
For more than a decade, physicists in Japan have been observing cosmic rays that shouldn't exist. Cosmic rays are particles that travel through the Universe at speeds close to the speed of light. Some cosmic rays come to Earth through violent events, such as a supernova explosion. But we know nothing about the origin of the high-energy particles observed in nature. And even this is not a real secret.
When cosmic ray particles move through space, they lose energy when they collide with photons low level energy, for example, from the cosmic microwave background radiation. However, the University of Tokyo discovered cosmic rays with very high energy. Theoretically, they could only appear from our galaxy, but astronomers cannot find the source of these cosmic rays in our galaxy.
4. The phenomenon of homeopathy
Madeleine Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University Belfast, is a disaster for homeopathy. She opposed homeopathic claims that a chemical could be diluted to such an extent that a sample contained virtually nothing but water and still have healing powers.
Ennis decided to prove once and for all that homeopathy was just talk. In her latest work, she describes how her group, in four different laboratories, examined the effects of ultra-dilute histamine solutions on white blood cells involved in inflammation.
To the surprise of scientists, it turned out that homeopathic solutions (diluted to such an extent that they apparently did not contain even a single molecule of histamine) worked the same way as histamine. Before these experiments, no homeopathic remedy had ever worked in a clinical trial. But the Belfast study suggests that something is happening. “We,” says Ennis, “cannot explain our findings and report them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon.”
If the results turn out to be real, she believes, the consequences could be quite significant: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.
5. Dark matter
Take our best knowledge of gravity, apply it to the rotation of galaxies, and you immediately find a problem: according to our knowledge, galaxies should be breaking apart. Galactic matter rotates around a central point as its gravitational pull creates centripetal forces. But there is not enough mass in galaxies to create the observed rotation.
Vera Rubin, an astronomer at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, noticed this anomaly in the late seventies of the last century. The best answer physicists could come up with was that there is more matter in the Universe than we can observe.
The problem was that no one could explain what this “dark matter” was. Scientists still cannot explain it, and this is an unpleasant gap in our understanding. Astronomical observations suggest that dark matter should make up approximately 90% of the mass of the Universe, and yet we are astonishingly ignorant of what that 90% is.
6. Life on Mars
July 20, 1976. Gilbert Levin sits on the very edge of his chair. Millions of kilometers away, on Mars, the Viking spacecraft took soil samples. Levin's equipment mixed them with a substance containing carbon-14. Scientists participating in the experiment believe that if methane emissions containing carbon-14 are found in the soil, then there should be life on Mars. Viking analyzers give positive result. Something takes in nutrients, converts them, and then releases a gas containing carbon-14. But why is there no holiday?
Because another analyzer, designed to identify organic molecules that are essential signs of life, found nothing. Scientists were cautious and declared the Viking's discoveries a false positive. But is it? Results transmitted from NASA's latest spacecraft show that the surface of Mars almost certainly contained water in the past and was therefore favorable for life.
There is other evidence. “Every mission to Mars,” says Gilbert Levin, “provides data that supports my conclusion. None of them contradict him.” Levin no longer defends his views alone. Joe Miller, a microbiologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, reanalyzed the data and believes the spikes show signs of a circadian cycle. And this with a high degree of probability suggests the presence of life. Whether these scientists are right is still unknown.
7. Tetraneutrons
Four years ago, six particles were discovered that should not have existed. They were called tetraneutrons - four neutrons that are in a bond that defies the laws of physics.
A team of scientists from Caen, led by Francisco Miguel Marquez, fired beryllium nuclei at a small carbon target and analyzed their trajectories using detectors. Scientists expected to see four different neutrons hitting different detectors. Instead, they detected only one flash of light in one detector. The energy of this flare showed that all four neutrons hit the same detector. Perhaps it's just a coincidence, and four neutrons accidentally hit the same place at the same time. But this is ridiculously unlikely. At the same time, such behavior is not unlikely for tetraneutrons.
True, some might argue that according to the standard model of particle physics, tetraneutrons simply cannot exist. After all, according to the Pauli principle, in one system there are not even two protons or neutrons that could have the same quantum properties. The nuclear force holding them together is such that it cannot hold even two single neutrons, let alone four.
Marquez and his team were so stunned by the results that they “buried” the data in scientific work, which spoke of a certain probability of the discovery of tetraneutrons in the future. After all, if you start changing the laws of physics to justify the connection of four neutrons, chaos will arise.
Recognizing the existence of tetraneutrons would mean that the combination of elements formed after the Big Bang is not consistent with what we now observe. And, to make matters worse, the formed elements become too heavy for space. However, there is other evidence that suggests that matter may consist of numerous neutrons. These are neutron stars. They contain a huge number of bound neutrons, which means that when the neutrons gather in masses, forces that are still inexplicable to us come into play.
8. Pioneer Anomaly
In 1972, the Americans launched the Pioneer-10 spacecraft. On board there was a message to extraterrestrial civilizations - a sign with images of a man, a woman and a diagram of the location of the Earth in space. A year later, Pioneer 11 followed.
By now, both devices should already be in deep space. However in an unusual way their trajectories deviated greatly from the calculated ones. Something began to pull (or push) them, as a result of which they began to move with acceleration. It was tiny - less than a nanometer per second, equivalent to one ten-billionth of the gravity on the Earth's surface. But this was enough to shift Pioneer 10 off its trajectory by 400,000 kilometers.
NASA lost contact with Pioneer 11 in 1995, but until then it deviated from its trajectory in the same way as its predecessor. What caused this? No one knows. Some possible explanations have already been dismissed, including software bugs, solar wind and fuel leaks. If the cause was some kind of gravitational effect, then we know nothing about it. Physicists are simply at a loss.
9. Dark energy
This is one of the best known and most intractable problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the Universe was expanding at an ever-increasing rate. Previously, it was believed that after the Big Bang the expansion of the Universe slowed down. Scientists have not yet found a reasonable explanation for this discovery. One of the assumptions is that some property of empty space is responsible for this phenomenon. Cosmologists called it dark energy. But all attempts to identify her failed.
10. The tenth planet
At the very edge of the solar system, in the cold zone of space beyond Pluto, something strange is happening. After passing through the Kuiper Belt - a region of space riddled with icy rocks - a completely empty space is suddenly revealed. Astronomers call this boundary the Kuiper rock, since after it the density of the cosmic rock belt decreases sharply. What is the reason?
The only answer to this may be the presence of a tenth planet in our solar system. Moreover, in order to clear space of debris in this way, it must be as massive as the Earth or Mars. But, although calculations show that such a body could cause the existence of the Kuiper belt, no one has ever seen this legendary tenth planet.
11. Cosmic signal WOW
It lasted 37 seconds and came from space. On August 15, 1977, on a printout from a radio telescope in Delaware, recorders wrote: WOW. And twenty-eight years later, no one knows what caused this signal. The pulses came from the constellation Sagittarius at a frequency of about 1420 MHz. Transmissions in this range are prohibited by international agreement. Natural sources of radiation, such as thermal emissions from planets, cover a much wider range of frequencies. What caused the emission of these pulses? There is still no answer.
The closest star to us in this direction is 220 light years away. If the signal came from there, then it must be either a huge astronomical event or a developed extraterrestrial civilization with an amazingly powerful transmitter. All subsequent observations on the same part of the sky led to nothing. No signal similar to WOW has been recorded.
12. Such fickle constants
In 1997, astronomer John Webb and his team at the University of New South Wales in Sydney analyzed the light coming to Earth from distant quasars. On its 12 billion-year journey, the light passes through interstellar clouds made of metals such as iron, nickel and chromium.
The researchers found that these atoms absorb photons of light from the quasar, but not at all what was expected. The only more or less reasonable explanation for this phenomenon is that a physical constant, called the fine structure constant, or alpha, has a different value when light passes through clouds. But this is heresy!
Alpha is an extremely important constant that determines how light interacts with matter, and it must not change! Its value depends, among other things, on the charge of the electron, the speed of light and Planck's constant. Is it possible that some of these parameters actually changed?!
None of the physicists wanted to believe that the measurements were correct. Webb and his team spent years trying to find errors in their results. But they still haven't succeeded. Webb's results aren't the only ones that suggest there's something wrong with our understanding of alpha.
Recent analysis of the only known natural nuclear reactor, which operated nearly 2 billion years ago at what is now Oklo in Gabon, also suggests that something has changed in the way light interacts with matter. Proportion of certain radioactive isotopes, produced in such a reactor, depends on alpha, and therefore the analysis of fission products preserved in Oklo soil makes it possible to determine the value of the constant during their formation. Using this method, Steve Lamorey and his colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico suggested that alpha had decreased by more than 4% since the Oklo event. And this means that our ideas about constants may turn out to be incorrect.
13. Low temperature nuclear fusion (LTF)
After an absence of sixteen years he returned. Although, in fact, NTS never disappeared. Since 1989, US Navy laboratories have conducted more than 200 experiments to determine whether nuclear reactions can room temperature generate more energy than it consumes (it is believed that this is only possible inside stars).
Controlled nuclear fusion would solve many of the world's energy problems. It's no wonder the US Department of Energy is so interested in it. Last December, after a lengthy review of all the evidence, it announced that it was open to proposals for new NTS experiments. This is a pretty sharp turn. Fifteen years ago, this same department concluded that the initial results on NTS obtained by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and presented at a press conference in 1989 could not be confirmed, and thus they are probably false.
The basic principle of NTS is that immersing palladium electrodes in heavy water (in which oxygen is combined with an isotope of heavy hydrogen) can release a large number of energy. The catch is that all generally accepted scientific theories believe that nuclear fusion at room temperature is impossible.
Ebola and Zika fevers, swine and bird flu - all new names of terrible viruses are emerging and multiplying with alarming speed, and hundreds of people die from the effects of these viruses. Why are infectious disease specialists and virologists unable to stay ahead of and promptly extinguish outbreaks of deadly diseases? The Rossiya Segodnya MIA observer addressed this and other questions to the Deputy Director of the Central Research Institute of Epidemiology of Rospotrebnadzor, Academician Viktor Maleev.
— Viruses are not a far-fetched threat. In human pathology, infections occupy a significant place, and among them the majority are viral. It’s just that not all of them are open yet, and new ones open periodically. It is important to understand here: viruses are a creation of nature, and all changes in nature and in humans cause changes in them, and they, in turn, change their environment. My colleague Professor Eduard Karamov came to the conclusion that changes in the nature of viruses are associated with changes in the structure of the oceans, coral islands and many other global natural metamorphoses.
New viruses constantly appear, many of them are disease-causing, pathogenic, and in addition, already known ones mutate. And the fact that science is not always able not only to predict these changes, but also to track them, only speaks of how little we have studied nature, in which there is immeasurably more unexplored than studied. And viruses, I repeat, component natural factors.
— From time to time there are reports that another virus was developed in secret laboratories as biological weapons, and now, by someone’s evil will, he broke out...
— I also recently heard on television that Rockefeller is supposedly trading. I just can’t understand why he needs this - does he have nothing else to trade?
Seriously, there are many laboratories in the world that study and cultivate viral cultures for research and medical purposes. Doctors constantly exchange virus strains among themselves, and now we will probably ask the WHO ( World Organization health) strains of the Zika fever virus to see what it is, test it on experimental organisms. Without studying this or that dangerous infections, we will not be able to develop vaccines against them.
— Viral danger in last years Has it really intensified, or is this some kind of subjective feeling caused by the mass of media reports?
- Someone says that an asteroid will destroy us... There are many versions of the coming end of the world, and viruses are one of them. Information, of course, plays a role. However, the information is not out of nowhere. The scale of the spread of diseases, deaths from certain infections - all this, unfortunately, usually happens in reality.
— You say that we still know little about viruses - but why? After all, other viral cultures have existed for millions of years...
— I repeat: we don’t know nature well. And we try to influence it, in most cases without imagining the consequences. When I was at school, there was a poster on the wall in our classroom with a portrait of Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin and his quote: “We cannot expect favors from nature. Taking them from her is our task.” Throughout its history, humanity has invaded nature, changing it. The environment around us is changing, the person himself is changing. We have learned to move quickly around the planet - infections began to move faster with us. The spread of drug addiction led to the spread of AIDS. Sexual liberation leads to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Fashion for tattoos and piercings leads to an increase in the number of cross-infections, including viral hepatitis.
Science does not stand still, but studying nature is objectively not such a fast process as “conquering” it. Of all the causative agents of human diseases, only about 5% are still known, not to mention the causative agents of other representatives of the fauna - animals, birds.
“Nevertheless, humanity has managed to defeat many terrible diseases of past years - epidemics of smallpox, plague, cholera no longer occur, and if they do happen somewhere, they do not spread fatally.
— Some infectious diseases can actually be dealt with. Some infections can be overcome with vaccination. It is not always possible to develop antiviral vaccines. There is still no vaccine for AIDS, although huge amounts of money are being invested in its development. In the USA, I visited a huge complex, stuffed with the most expensive equipment, where they are developing a vaccine against AIDS, but it still doesn’t exist, although this virus has been known for decades. There are still no vaccines against hepatitis C or malaria.
There are many reasons for this. Viruses mutate quickly, it is difficult to study their structures, there have been cases when vaccines only worsened the situation - as happened, for example, with the polio vaccine, some vaccines cause addiction.
The fact is that the criteria developed by Louis Pasteur for bacterial infections are not suitable for viruses. But even with regard to bacterial infections, we cannot talk about complete victory over them. So far, only smallpox has been completely eradicated, and nothing else has been possible, however, difficulties may still arise with smallpox. Its place in nature was taken by monkeypox, which was discovered in Africa. Thank God, it hasn’t escaped anywhere yet, unlike the Zika fever virus, which previously also didn’t make itself felt.
But who knows what might happen tomorrow? Why do focal infections suddenly break out of their endemic zone and begin to spread across the planet? Some associate this with ecology, some with urbanization, some with climate change... They associate this with the El Niño phenomenon (fluctuations in the temperature of the surface layer of water in the equatorial part Pacific Ocean). But, of course, no one knows for sure. Although for infections, I think the climate still has great importance. A simple example: meteorologists are not always able to correctly predict the weather. But influenza outbreaks depend on the weather and are seasonal. In the summer, there are usually no flu epidemics.
— In order to develop a new vaccine based on the obtained strain of the virus, it takes at least six months. And the virus can change literally in a matter of days - even just passing through the human body, for example, with a compromised immune system, with HIV infection.
Everything in nature changes. People change - our ancestors, for example, were much leaner. Our habits and lifestyle are changing. People take many medications almost uncontrollably, food additives- The pharmaceutical industry is operating at full capacity. And all this causes viruses and bacteria to change with us.
