A Clockwork Orange - Stanley Kubrick and The Rolling Stones.

Before Stanley Kubrick (1928 –1999) got hold of "A Clockwork Orange", writer Anthony Burgess (1917 –1993) negotiated with Mick Jagger, who wanted to obtain film rights for the sum of a few hundred dollars.

Jagger wanted to make a film in which his "Rolling Stones" would play the heartless thugs in white.

Fortunately for Kubrick and film art history, Mick gave up on that idea and the role was given to Malcolm McDowell, who won great acclaim for his role as Alex DeLarge, a young sociopathic hoodlum brainwashed by a dystopian British government of the near future.

Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” was nominated for four Academy Awards and won numerous prestigious awards. 

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Injustice - Dmitri Mendeleev

It would be logical that a scientist like Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was awarded with Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

After all, Mendeleev invented the periodic table of chemical elements, and described the manner of their organization and grouping on which modern chemistry is based.

Furthermore, his system was so good that he predicted the existence of certain elements that, in his time, weren’t yet been discovered.

However, in 1906 when the Nobel Committee for Chemistry recommended Mendeleev for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences rejected the proposal.

The reason behind this decision was – little revenge.

Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, who was awarded with Nobel Prize in 1903 for the theory of ionic dissociation, interfered and pressed for the rejection of Mendeleev. Mendeleev was his most eloquent critic and Arrhenius saw an opportunity to avenge himself.

The same thing happened and in 1907.

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Kiss – From cave to big screen.

Motherly, friendly, French, movie, Judas... People are kissing each other from the beginning of time. Here are some of the most interesting theories about how and why was kissing invented.

Sexologists say that a kiss is even more intimate then the act of sex itself, regardless the fact is that kiss is the most frequent physical contact among people. 99.9 percent of people on the planet know what kiss is, but very few know the real truth about the origin and meaning of the kiss.

Kiss is a powerful phenomenon, that’s for sure. If you think about it, you will come to the conclusion that kiss had an influence on the course of life of every man, it was the beginning and test of survival of every relationship, and it has significantly influenced the history of mankind. Film industry has recognized the power of kiss, but also and people from show business. You can still hear stories about how Madonna kissed Britney Spears at one of the MTV awards, right?


Even today, the phenomenon of kissing is not fully explained. We even have a branch of science that studies kissing and it’s called filematology.

No one is definitely sure why people started touching each other with lips and exchange saliva, but it is known that this kind of physical contact was present even in the period around 1,500 BC.

According to one theory, the kiss was created because of practical reasons – so that people can lick salt from each other’s cheeks. The Vedic scriptures describe the phenomenon of kissing as an act of affection. It is believed that the kiss has culturally spread from India via Greece, and that Alexander the Great is the most creditable for that, because he brought it to Europe during the great invasion in 326 BC. Besides spices and tea, the great commander had, allegedly, brought and something that was even hotter and spicier then the tea and spices together – the kiss, which conquered Europe with the speed of fire.

There are different opinions about the origin of the kiss. According to one legend it was invented by medieval knights who were trying to determine in this way if their wives had drunk the juicy mead. According to another theory, the kiss derived from the relationship between mother and child. Allegedly, cave mothers, who didn’t have blender like today’s mothers, were chewing the food and then, with their mouth, they were feeding their children.

Some cultures knew of kissing long before others, but they considered that act too private and didn’t discussed nor write about it for many years and centuries. Even Bible says that God kissed a man and gave him life through that kiss. 

Some cultures like Finnish, Burmese, Polynesian, Philippinian, or cultures of African tribes consider kissing as weird, absurd and rude. They have ways of greeting like nose rubbing or gasping at the throat. In this way, they can recognize each member of the tribe based on his smell.

Some even believe that kissing evolved as a way of spreading bacteria between partners. In this way they would become immune to each other’s diseases, and were able to have kids. At the time of Ancient Rome, kissing was used as a way of showing status – that status was ranked according to permission to kiss a certain part of the body. Those who have enjoyed higher status were kissing each other on the cheek and arm, while ordinary mortals had permission to kiss feet.

In Chinese tradition, it is considered that the ideal balance between yin and yang can be achieved only by exchanging "liquid jade", better known as saliva, or, in romantic terms – with a French kiss.

In Naples, in 1562, kissing in public was forbidden, and those who were caught in that act were condemned to death.

In Hartford, Connecticut, the old law, which is still in force, considers it illegal for a man to kiss his wife on Sundays. And in Indiana, until recently, there was a law that strictly forbidden men with mustaches to kiss women - probably for reasons of hygiene.

English word “kiss” originates from Germanic word “kussian”, which onomatopoetically imitates what happens during kiss. What is considered as a French kiss in western world, in India is called English kiss.

Name „movie kiss“ says by itself that a kiss had a significant role in the film industry. In 2005, a movie called “Brokeback Mountain” attracted much attention because of description of sexual relation between men, but the first kiss of two men was shown much earlier – some eighty years before, in a movie “Wings” from 1927. However, the first homosexual kiss was shown even before that – in a movie “Manslaughter” from 1922, where two lesbians were kissing each other.

For a long time, the longest kiss in film history was the one between Jane Wyman and Regis Toomey – it lasted three minutes and five seconds. However, in 2010, that record was broken by Neckar Zadegan and Traci Dinwiddie with a longest movie kiss, and also the longest lesbian kiss in a movie.

In the movie “Some Like It Hot” from 1959, actor Tony Curtis, who plays Joe or Josephine after he disguises himself as female band member, shocked the public when he said that his kiss with Sugar (Marilyn Monroe) was like "kissing with Hitler." He later gave an explanation for his statement and said that such a stupid question (How did he like kissing a sex symbol like Marilyn) deserved an equally stupid answer. “What was I supposed to say? What do you think it’s like to kiss Marilyn Monroe you dickheads?” – Curtis said.

In 1929, Greta Garbo appeared in MGM’s last silent film called “Kiss”. It was the end of silent film era, but not the era of kisses.

In 1984, Rock Hudson kissed Linda Evans in “Dynasty”. And when it was reveled that he had AIDS, Hollywood was swept with panic that she was infected too. The actress revealed later that the people around her didn’t want to come near her because they had kids and they didn’t want to expose themselves to risk.

In Indian cinema, kiss was forbidden for a long time. The first real kiss with open mouth and a tongue was shown in Indian cinemas through a little-known English film from 1926.

Around the world, there are some pretty interesting but also and vulgar names for a kiss. People on Maldives use a term, which, when translated, means “lip sucking”, and the kiss in South Africa is called “tongue in lungs”.

Interestingly, the kissing was unknown to many people. Indians and Aborigines didn’t kiss before meeting Europeans. After that, they introduced that custom.

Also, one of the biggest misapprehensions is that the French have invented the French kiss. They haven’t even gave it its name. The truth is that in 1923 this term was forged in England.  And the only reason this kiss has that “French” in its name is because the French, at the beginning of the 19th century were known as amorous persons.

Kissing is good for your health

Scientists have discovered that kissing has multiple positive effects on health because it increases the secretion of hormone of happiness.  Even bacteria, which are present in the saliva, with their mixing contribute to stronger immunity; they are breaking down plaque in the mouth and are destroying harmful microorganisms. Kissing is also good for dental health because it stimulates the secretion of saliva, which, on the other hand, has a function of washing the mouth and removing the remains of food.

Clinical tests have shown that touching, including kissing, reduces blood pressure, stress, and improves the immune status of the organism. Many believe that the activation of a large number of facial muscles during kissing is preventing the appearance of wrinkles and is slowing the aging process.

Kissing is pleasure

The lips are definitely made for kissing. They are the thinnest part of our body and 100 times more sensitive than our fingers. The tongue and the inside of the oral cavity contain enormous amount of nerves that are transmitting messages directly to the limbic system, the oldest part of the brain associated with sexual pleasure. A kiss is stimulating the secretion of the hormone oxytocin, which affects parts of the brain responsible for pleasure and adrenalin, and thus creating the feeling of butterflies in our stomach.

Facts about kissing

-    Two thirds of men are leaning their heads to the right when they are kissing someone;
-    Most kisses are shown in the movie "Don Juan" from 1926 - 191 kiss in 110 minutes;
-    In 1990, Alfred Wolfram kissed a 8001 person in a period of eight hours at a festival in Minnesota – he kissed, on average, 16 persons per minute.
-    Men who are kissing their wives before going to work, on average, are earning more money than those who do not do that;
-    The only animals that are kissing each other’s mouth are chimpanzees, orangutans and cats;
-    In just one exchange of saliva during a kiss, there is more than 278 species of bacteria, and many of them can cause various diseases;
-    A passionate kiss can increase the level of hormones in your body so high, that it can take away one minute of your life;
-    During his life, a man is spending approximately 336 hours or two full weeks kissing someone.
-    One French kiss is activating 23 muscles;
-    Ten minutes of kissing is burning 30 calories;
-    70 percent of people experience their first kiss before they turn 15.

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Our first nine months are shaping the rest of our life

Scientists can now predict health of a person even before his birth. By calculating all factors that are shaping the baby in the stomach, they can determine who will later be obese, diabetic, prone to heart attacks, cancer and other diseases.

What makes us the way we are? Why are some people predisposed to be tense, obese, or asthma sufferers? How is it that some of us are prone to heart attack, diabetes or high blood pressure?

Type and amount of food you received in the womb, pollutants, drugs and infections to whom you have been exposed during your mother's pregnancy, your mother's health, stress level and state of mind while she was pregnant - all these factors shape you as a baby and continue to influence you for the rest of your life. 

This is a provocative statement of the theory known as fetal origin, whose pioneers say that nine months of pregnancy determine our later life and permanently affect brain development and functioning of organs like heart and liver. They claim that conditions encountered in the womb shape our susceptibility to disease, our appetite and metabolism, our intelligence and temperament. 

In the literature on the subject, which exploded over the past 10 years, you can find references on the fetal origins of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, allergies, asthma, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, mental illness…They are even explaining the causes of diseases associated with older age, arthritis, osteoporosis and dementia.

Most of what pregnant woman encounters in her daily life - the air she breathes, food and drink she consumes, chemicals to which she is exposed, even the emotions she feels – are, in some way, shared with the fetus. The fetus receives all of these influences and makes them a part of its flesh and blood.

Two decades ago, a British physician named David Barker, noticed odd correlations on a map: the poorest regions in England and Wales are the ones with the highest rates of heart disease. After comparing the health of some 15,000 individuals with their birth weight, he revealed an unexpected link between low weight at birth - a common indicator of poor prenatal nutrition - and heart disease in middle age. Faced with inadequate nutrition, concluded Barker, the fetus diverts nutrients to its most important organ, the brain, and skimps on other parts of the body - the debt that is paid later in the form of a weakened heart.

One study that was conducted at Harvard showed that mothers, who gain too much weight during pregnancy, increase the risk that their child will be obese already in its third year. Another study has shown that this relation is present even in adolescence.

During pregnancy, women with high blood sugar levels hinder the development of fetus’s metabolism, and thus create a predisposition to diabetes and obesity. This was determined with a research conducted over Pima Indians in the reservation in Arizona, which have the highest percentage of type 2 diabetes (metabolic disease) in the world. Studies have shown that the cause of this is prenatal experience, or, to be exact, high blood sugar levels in mothers during pregnancy.

Frederica P. Perera, Director of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health, became interested in the effects of polluted air on the fetus some 30 years ago. Perera’s research was associated with exposure to polluted air during pregnancy, something that affects the number of adverse birth outcomes, including premature birth, low birth weight and heart disorders. One of her most memorable studies was the one from 1998, when more than 500 pregnant women, from Upper Manhattan and South Bronx, wore identical black backpacks at all time, for two days. Inside each backpack was a device that was constantly monitoring air pollution levels. When babies were born, blood analysis from the umbilical cord showed that 40 percent of them had subtle DNA damages, and this is associated with increased risk of cancer. Further analysis revealed that these children were more than two times slower in learning at the age of 3, had less points when they enrolled in school at the age of 5, and less points on IQ tests than children who were exposed to less polluted air when they were in the womb.

During similar researches, scientists came to believe that the conditions in the womb affect not only our physical health, but also the intelligence, temperament, even sanity.

The evidences show that pregnant women, who are exposed to starvation or extreme stress, deliver children with higher risk of schizophrenia. In the mid-20th century, inhabitants of the province of Anhui in China suffered from a severe starvation. Individuals who were born to women who suffered from hunger had two times more chances to suffer from schizophrenia than those who were born in another period.

Catherine Monk, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, says that mental state of pregnant women may shape the psyche of a child. In fact, Monk and her colleagues have, in a way, "put the fetus on the couch". In her laboratory, they attached devices, that are measure breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, excitement, and heart rate of fetuses, to depressed and anxious pregnant women on one side and pregnant women with normal mood on the other side. Then they subjected these women to mental exercises. All women showed signs of physiological stress when they were answering on the questions during this test, but only fetuses of depressed and distressed women displayed their own disturbances. “This difference suggests that these fetuses are more sensitive to stress. This kind of research takes us back to the original question, when did we became what we are now” - says Monk.

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Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are at the door

End of the world is certain, but when will this happen, no one knows. Those who believe that the end is near, already see four clear signs: solar flares, self-destruction, mass death of birds and the Mayan calendar.

Prognoses of the end of the world and humanity are not new, they are mentioned practically since the beginning of civilization. Some are looking for the proof of this in the Old Testament books, in various prophecies, but also in the position of stars and planets. And when this fatal day comes, people who believe in that, will probably respond differently. Some will maybe decide to spend their last moments doing what they always wanted to do, but it will be nothing strange if a lot of cases of collective suicides occur. After all, we have such examples in all parts of the world.

However, the fact that nothing lasts forever is something that should worry all of us. Laymen and experts agree that the end of the world is certain, the only question is when will this happen. Judging by the events that have marked the last days of last year, gloomy predictions of scientists, and predictions that are recorded in the ancient prophecies, apocalypse is not far away! It may happen the next year already.

Here are four possible scenarios according to which the life on earth will disappear and "irrefutable" proofs that this will happen soon.

1. Sun will kill us

The Sun is the source of life on our planet, but it is also its potential murderer. In the book "Apocalypse 2012", Lawrence E. Joseph claims that storms and activities on the surface of the Sun are more intense in the last few years than in the past 11 million years, and the last time such thing happened, the last ice age melted. The peak of solar activity can be expected already next year, when the storms will be most intensive and most destructive. Solar flares, as these energy charges are called, could threaten the Earth's magnetic field that protects us from Sun’s radiation. Scientists say that we can already see holes in this magnetic field the size of California. These storms have appeared during the course of human history, but the danger now is much greater, because we ourselves have contributed to it! 

In fact, over the past decades, we have built, around the globe, an electrical high-voltage network that will attract the first strike.  Only one such storm could throw us back in the time before the discovery of electricity. People from the NASA call this storm a switch in the sky, because it is indeed something like that. It will be as if someone turned off every light on the Earth, and, despite huge investments, we will not be able to turn them on for at least next five years. And what consequences could that have, it is not hard to imagine.

The big problem of our planet are overloaded transformers, because more than half of them can not stand the amount of energy running through them. It is just a matter of time, or in other words, one stronger solar storm, for the entire power system to blow in to pieces! More shocking news is that all large power plants depend exclusively on one satellite which is long past its use. Namely, it is the ACE satellite, which is located in the gravitational well, and that is - point of Earth-Sun gravitational equilibrium. Its sole function is to warn, 15 to 45 minutes earlier,  about the arrival of magnetic storms, but these informations are rarely (practically never) used. Theoretically, every time the satellite sends a signal, we should turn off the electricity in the whole world, but each restarting of electricity would cost at least ten billion dollars.

On the other hand, although they are regularly attacking Earth, solar storms are usually ending at the North Pole, which is also the magnetic pole. In other words, because of the huge cost the only security measure we can use against the Sun's attack, which could go a little further than expected, consists of just four words –preying that it won’t! 

2. We will kill ourselves

There are thousand ways how we can kill ourselves, and to be honest, with every new day, we are more persistent and dedicated to that work. However, what can really exterminate us are scientific experiments with all manner of things. Supporters of conspiracy theories long believe that HIV is invented in a laboratory, just as Ebola or swine flu. According to them, mad cow disease is a secret experiment with the aim to turn human brains into mush, and to make them slaves without emotions and thought. What can we say about the development of nuclear and biological weapons that are developing faster than the means against their destructive force? Yet, what worries the most the conspiracy theorists is "tampering" with God's particle.

It is a scientific experiment that runs near the Swiss-French border, and which aims to create black holes in artificial conditions. The whole experiment is called “The hunt for the God particle”, and it comes down to causing collisions with the power of incredible 14 billion electron volts. Will this really create a black hole, and if it does, will this black hole suck us all in, is what scares the lay people throughout the world. After all, whatever we discover, or invent, there’s always a lunatic who will misuse it.

If we disregard someone's paranoia and panic, the fact still remains that the fear of scientific inventions and their abuse is not unfounded. While the production of nuclear weapons requires a large plant that is easy to detect, biological weapons can be made without any problem in a small, hidden laboratory. And what can one sick mind do, its not hard to imagine.

 After the terrorist attacks in America and the destruction of the twin towers, in this part of the world the panic doesn’t stop at the thought of what Al Qaeda maid have at its  disposal, and what can acquire at anytime. According to one doomsday scenario, it all ends with an eruption of a mega volcano. If it is going to be like that, what are the chances that Al Qaeda already has a thermonuclear bomb that will wipe America from the map of the world in a split second?

3. Mass mortality of birds

Birds that fell dead from the sky at the end of last year, but also the mortality of entire animal species around the world, is a reliable sign, according to many, that apocalypse is at the door. To reiterate, at New Year's Eve, residents of Arkansas town were hit with a true rain of dead birds, which were pouring on the roofs of houses and cars. It is estimated that on this occasion at least five thousand red-winged blackbirds died.

Just days earlier, Arkansas River threw out tens of thousands of dead fish. A flock of 500 birds also fell in Baton Rouge, and the same has happened in Sweden and New Zealand. At the end of the first week of the New Year, near Kent in the UK, the sea washed up 40,000 dead crabs. Similar examples have been recorded and in other parts of the world.

Why do animals die en masse? Ancient prophecies are offering an answer. They say that animals will be the first who will feel the impending disaster and react in two ways: with mass suicide or natural death that science can not explain. 

Many supporters of conspiracy theories accuse the U.S. government (Its secret researches, to be exactly) even for these unusual cases. While some claim that Americans are testing a new biological weapon, others believe that it is a laser beam, a type that can cause heart attack and lead to immediate death. In all this mess, many tend to see and some other reasons, also not very encouraging. For example, many believe that the switch of the Earth's poles is well underway, and since birds are orienting by them, it is not entirely surprising that they are blindly flying into icy clouds or being entangled in electric cables.

Scientists themselves are stunned. They are trying to provide any kind of explanation, even one that will maybe cause disbelief or mockery. Thus, the biologists are explaining the death of fish with some kind of disease and blame cold for the death of crabs. Allegedly, such cases occurred even before, but now, due to New Year holidays, they were far more covered by the media. To stem mass hysteria, the U.S. authorities did not hesitate to find some truck driver who allegedly ran into a flock of birds on the road, and hit and injured most of them. If we are to believe the explanation of local authorities, New Year fireworks have caused mass mortality of birds in other three separate incidents. 

The logical question is why such phenomena wasn’t reported in other places where shooting at air is something like a tradition.

4. Mayans have predicted all

Judging by the ancient Mayan calendar, the end of the world will occur on December 21, 2012. However, whenever it comes to prophecy, there are at least two problems: first, will it really come true, and second, is it an authentic record or document or was it, as usual, amended or edited during the past time.

These ancient people inhabited the area of today's Guatemala, Honduras and Yucatan.  They were known as an advanced civilization of astronomers and scientists. They were obsessed with measuring time. They measured everything, sun phases, pregnancy, growth of crops and the like. They created twenty different calendars, and in one, they even measured the development of civilization and the planet by dividing it into periods.  Each period was 5125 years long, and when compared with the Gregorian calendar, it turns out that the period in which we live began in 3144 BC and ends exactly on December 21 next year.

 The Mayans depicted transition between periods as bloody and extremely difficult. After that comes a turn, when we enter into a new period, which is full of optimism and enlightenment. What is disturbing is the fact that this date, which is depressing by itself (it is a day with the longest night), is also the date when the Sun will found itself at the center of the Milky Way. Some scientists claim that this could cause a switch between magnetic poles on Earth, and this would definitely have tragic consequences on the life on our planet.

Americans have again tried to calm the public. Allegedly, according to the official NASA press release, issued last year, there is no scientific evidence that Mayan calendar is correct at all! According to them, the world will not end in 2012, because, at this point, we are not threaten by a collision with a meteorite, which, if existed, would already have been visible in the sky. In addition, the agency said that none of the relevant experts has found any cause of some potential disaster. Therefore, NASA knows that the end will not occur next year.

End of the world is certain, but when will this happen, no one knows.

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"Ecstasy" is not causing brain damage!

After serious research, medical experts from Harvard have come to this shocking discovery.  They have also criticized all previous studies on the subject of harmfulness of MDMA.

Most recent research that has shown that it is not true that "ecstasy" causes brain damage, like it was considered and substantiated with many studies a decade ago, has caused shock and concern. How to tell the public now that "ecstasy" is not bad, given that its use is widespread and that it is the cheapest drug? Will these results encourage more drug use, and will those who had doubts whether to try the "party pill" or not now be persuaded to do so?

Research that proves that the pill, without which rave can not be imagined, is not harmful, is one of the largest that studied consequences of taking MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, official title of this illegal substance) and was conducted by a team led by Professor John Halpern from Harvard Medical School. The results were published last week in a magazine "Addiction".

Experiments from Harvard have shown that cognitive abilities of "ecstasy" users are equal to those that are "clean”.  Until now, the consumption of "ecstasy" was associated with the damage of the central nervous system.  With his results, Halpern openly criticized the quality of all previous studies that linked this drug with the brain damage.

"Too many studies have been carried out on small populations, while overarching conclusions have been drawn from them" - Halpern said, adding that some previous researches did studied users of the rave culture, which includes all-night dancing, lack of sleep and fluids, and which are itself factors that contribute to the negative cognitive effects. But, it wasn’t taken into account that ecstasy users consume and other drugs and alcohol, which can affect cognition, or that some of them might have suffered disruption of intellectual skills before they started taking "ecstasy".

Halpern’s study took into account only those “ecstasy” users who weren’t taking any other drugs and who didn’t suffer any previous brain damage. In his experiment, 1,500 potential participants were reduced to 52 selected users whose cognitive abilities were equal to those of the 59 persons who do not use drugs. Even samples of hair were taken from the participants to find out if they were lying about drugs and alcohol.

"Essentially we compared one group of people who danced and raved and took ecstasy with a similar group of individuals who danced and raved but who did not take ecstasy. When we did that, we found that there was no difference in their cognitive abilities" – Halpern says.

Although the results of previous studies indicated that ecstasy causes memory loss and long-term consequences on behavior, some scientists, like English Professor David Nutt, who was fired as chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for publicly stating that alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than ecstasy, were not surprised with these results. "I always assumed that, when properly designed studies were carried out, we would find ecstasy does not cause brain damage," said Nutt.

However, Halpern did admit that the use of “ecstasy” has its risks. “Ecstasy consumption is dangerous:  illegally-made pills can contain harmful contaminants, there are no warning labels, there is no medical supervision, and in rare cases people are physically harmed and even die from overdosing. It is important for drug-abuse information to be accurate, and we hope our report will help upgrade public health messages.  But while we found no ominous, concerning risks to cognitive performance, that is quite different from concluding that ecstasy use is ‘risk-free’."

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Absentmindedness – Sir Isaac Newton

One day, a friend of the English scientist Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) arrived at the agreed time for dinner.  He was invited the previous day by Newton himself. He found the scientist engrossed into his work, so he sat down and - waited.

Of course, Newton paid no attention to his friend. 

Time passed.

Finally, the servant brought dinner on a tray only for Newton because the host did not inform him that he would be having guests. Once again, Newton paid no attention to what was happening around him.

Mad because he was sitting neglected and silent, the guest took Newton’s dinner and ate it...

Soon after, Newton completed what he was doing. He looked with astonishment at his friend, who he previously did not even noticed, and then at empty tray:

- If I didn’t have you as my witness, I could have swear that I haven’t eaten my dinner! - absently uttered the famous mathematician.

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Culture or Science, Whatever!

Many anecdotes even today tell about the not so bright Soviet politician Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982), President of the Soviet Union and Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of that country.

Leonid’s political speeches, that he as the president had a chance to keep, were, in fact, often, very long. Sometimes they lasted for six hours since Brezhnev read the original, and the copy of the speech that they gave him every time before he climbed on the podium!

On one occasion, Leonid Brezhnev visited the south part of the country where he was supposed to speak about science. But, his adviser mistakenly gave him the speech about culture.

Leonid began to read...

Peroration lasted, and he did not even notice what he is actually speaking.

Others have noticed, but they did not dare to say anything

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Winged Dinosaurs!

 

 

Scientists have discovered a new type of dinosaur that was on its way to becoming a herbivore from carnivore.

In Utah,U.S., a mass grave of bird-like giants is found, called Falcarius utahensis.

The teeth of these winged dinosaurs are not very sharp because they were no longer used for tearing meat, while their tubes were extended and adapted to digest plants.

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21th Century Mission: Tame Gravity!

More than a century ago British writer George Wells imagined a fabulous way to travel to the moon: by abolishing gravity. Can science in the 21st century realize this idea?

To travel miles in a few seconds and not feel your own weight like chains… This exciting dream, to float in the air light as a feather, is even older than Newton's law of gravity. Thanks to airplanes, satellites, and even trains with magnetic levitation, a lot of things are already our reality. But none of these methods of transportation has provided us with real opportunity to float because gravity is not abolished. Other forces are just used to overcome gravity. In this way, not even magnetic levitation has something in common with anti-gravity. In this case, the effect of gravity is interfered with magnetic forces produced by superconducting magnets.

Expensive pleasure

From the point of view of official science, gravity is difficult to abolish. Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces of nature (the other three are electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear force). Gravity acts between the mass (mass is a measure of the amount of body matter). Mass is also responsible for the inertia of matter. Mass is, at the same time, inertial and gravitational, and that there is equality between those two, is something that Galileo proved in his famous experiment. Dropped from the top of the tower of Pisa to fall in free fall, both, wooden ball and ball of lead, fell with the same acceleration (Despite the legend, the tower is probably not the correct venue of this experiment, and Galileo probably performed this experiment on some ramp).

The equality of inertial and gravitational mass was the starting point for Einstein's general theory of relativity, which is now the modern theory of gravity. This theory brought mass in connection with space-time. Deeper implication of this theory is that gravity is not force, rather it’s a consequence of geometry, or, the very geometry itself. Gravity is the curvature of space-time, shaped by the mass that space-time contains. That means that the cancellation of gravity in a certain place would require canceling mass, and that is, matter and space-time. This is really expensive price for the pleasure of levitation. However, in recent decades, the idea to find anti-gravity force is revived.



Fifth force

Two decades ago a certain "discovery" was the focus of interest of the scientific community: it was about the so-called fifth force. It was not in the true sense anti-gravity, but apparently a new primary force that has the opposite effect of gravity.

American scientist Dr. Ephraim Fishbach and his associates from Purdue University, have decided that in a new way, after 80 years, carry out experiments of Hungarian scientist Loránd Eötvös. His experiments were improved version of Galileo’s experiment, and their goal was to confirm the principle of equality of gravitational and inertial mass. However, Fishbach noted that between these two masses there exists a very small difference. From this he concluded that the acceleration of the body, in a very small extent, depends and on the nature of the body, for which is responsible, until then unknown, fifth force. However, after that, no one else has managed to confirm the existence of this force, and she quickly fell into oblivion.

Some fifth teen years ago, Russian physicist Dr Yevgeny Podkletnov, boasted in certain English newspaper that he discovered anti-gravity. He performed experiments with superconducting disk that was rotating in a magnetic field, and recorded its weight reduction for about two percent. Unfortunately, this weight loss no one has managed to repeat, even the NASA who continued their research in this direction.

These failed experiments have not completely sunk all hopes of discovering anti-gravity. After all, in our universe obviously some force exists which is responsible for its rapid expansion. In addition, general relativity is certainly not the final theory of gravity because she is in "the quarrel" with quantum physics, in other words, with the second carrier pillar of modern physics. The other three fundamental forces are based on quantum physics.

Since general relativity is not able to describe gravity at the level of atomic particles, nothing prevents us not to use the theoretical gap and imagine that, at that size scale, there exist both quantum gravity and anti-gravity. Of course, if the latter phenomenon exists, it certainly has a negligible effect in the world that surrounds us. Will we ever be able to strengthen her and use her to build anti-gravity devices with which we would, for example, levitate and travel all around the world?

While we wait for the discovery of quantum gravity, which would just announce the possibility that there is anti-gravity, we are left with no option but to continue using tested means – airplanes. :)

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