In 1946, the United States created a pivotal machine. ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer. This computer was not the first of its kind. However it was the first general purpose digital computer, a trailblazer for others to follow. In current century, we are witnessing an pivotal development in history: the quantum computer. The […]
Mars: the Most Difficult Planet to Land on
by Chris Hwang To this day, setting foot on Mars remains to be one of mankind’s greatest ambitions. However, landing on the red planet is not easy. In fact, it’s the most difficult planet in our solar system to land on with a success rate of just 40%; lower than on the Moon, Venus, and […]
Why Do Batteries Have Less Capacity Over Time?
Written by Athena Cai Electronic devices have grown to become increasingly important as different aspects of our daily lives become more digitized. When consumers shop for new smartphones or laptops, one of the most important things they’ll consider is the battery life of the device. Will the device last the entire day or will they […]
Becoming Martians Pt. 2
by Yang Lu Getting to Mars is only half the battle. Once the astronauts get there, they won’t have enough fuel to make a round trip back to Earth. This means that scientists must find ways for the astronauts to live on Mars for upwards of a year while they wait for more supplies. What […]
Becoming Martians
By: Yang Lu On July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong uttered the famous words, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” as he stepped foot on the moon. From then on, mankind has looked beyond the moon to our neighbouring planet, Mars. The red planet shares many of the Earth’s characteristics. […]
Ed Lorenz, and Discovery of Butterfly Effect
It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. Eckels’ mind whirled. It couldn’t change things. Killing one butterfly couldn’t be that important! Could it? –Ray Bradbury, […]
Ones and Zeroes
In 2014, Matt Parker built a computer made entirely of dominoes. At first, you’d think that’s impossible. But by demonstrating the fundamental principles behind binary, the domino computer attempted to add the numbers 4 and 6 together in front of a crowd of hundreds. But what is binary? What is Binary? We use the decimal […]
De-extinction: The Revival of Dead Species
by Athena Cai What if you could wake up tomorrow and spend the day visiting a live mammoth at the zoo? Science has done the impossible again and again; now the reality of bringing back extinct species seems little beyond our reach. It begins with CRISPR CRISPR is a gene editing tool that allows biologists […]
A Million Dollar Problem: P vs NP
by Robin Yadav On May 24th, 2000, the Clay Mathematical Institute announced the Millennium Prize Problems. These seven problems are currently the most difficult problems in mathematics and will have profound implications if they are solved. So far, only one of these seven problems has been solved which is a testament to their difficulty. I […]
The Coded Bar
by Ingrid Wu Most of us have probably encountered an indefinite amount of barcodes in our day-to-day lives. A barcode itself is very simple: a series of parallel black lines and white spaces of varying widths. We’ve also all seen how it is used: the cashier scans the code and the details immediately pop up […]