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The array of cases in this video document over a century of math and science in the courtroom. From tragic miscarriages of justice to monumental victories for the innocent, these 7 stories demonstrate that progress in criminology is more serpentine than linear.
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What do you do when you've got a mathematical expression that's unsolvable because the numbers you need don't exist? You do what Hero of Alexandria did: you just invent one. That's how we got the concept of imaginary numbers, which Rene Descartes derided as being totally useless. Turns out he was wrong. #shorts
Where would we be with this dot?! It doesn't seem like much, but it's a critical element to our quick understanding of numbers. Without a decimal point or radix point, we have to mentally solve a little puzzle to figure out what the numbers we see actually mean. But with it, we know exactly what numbers we're looking at, and we know it instantly. And thanks to the printing press, we got rid of the line that just... wasn't very good at communicating what we needed to know. Decimals!
Just because you see a number like 100,000 doesn't mean it's actually 100,000. We operate in a base-10 numeral system, and it's got the familiar 10-based decimal root -- and "decimal" even comes from the Greek "deca" prefix meaning 10. But... not everyone thinks of the world in tens. Mainland Europeans used dozens, the Chinese and Mayans and Cherokee used the vigesimal base-20 system, and remnants of the sexagesimal base-60 system is what gives us 60 minutes and 360 degrees in a circle. There are lots and lots of ways to count and express number, and the simple system we have today is a beautiful conglomerate of thousands of years of experimentation.
Original Title: Greed, Lies, and Math: Busting America's Richest Woman
Original Title: 2 Prime Numbers = Perfect Palindrome
We can't write out every digit of Pi every time we use it, but we've got to represent it somehow. And you were probably taught that 22/7 was a great option. Well... it's an okay option. It's not bad, but it's not amazing.
A handful of numbers have a very special property: you can add their digits together and divide the original number by their total without a remainder. And why does it matter? Well, in terms of mathematics, it's mostly a curiosity. Dattatreya Ramchandra (D. R.) Kaprekar saw these numbers as sparking joy in the mind, so he named them "Harshad" numbers, with harshad being the Sanskrit word for joy. And it's an important lesson about numbers: not every bit of math needs to change the world. Something that makes you go "huh" for a brief moment can be enough.
Original Title: The Most Annoying Kaprekar Number
Kristen Gilbert was nicknamed the “Angel of Death” because so many patients happened to die during her shifts. No one saw her doing anything wrong, and there just wasn’t any physical proof in post mortem examinations… but many of the patients who went into cardiac arrests didn’t have health problems that should result in heart failure. Some were even young and physically healthy. But without hard evidence, is it even possible to determine whether a doctor or nurse is actually killing patients?
As borders twist and turn through geographic features and political realities, maps get complex quickly. But no matter how many bodies are being mapped, it's only necessary to use 4 different colors to make sure that no two that are touching share the same color. Given how intricate and complicated maps can be, how can we not need more than 4?!
Imagine a world in which everything about your life -- your friends, your family, which school you went to, your social media activity -- are reduced to a simple number used by police and the government to determine whether something bad will happen to you. It sounds crazy, and almost paranoid, but algorithm-based initiatives have aided police from Chicago to London to help guide public safety interventions. In the case of Robert McDaniel, he was assigned a score that put him on Chicago’s “Heat List,” and he was told that he was likely to be involved in a shooting. But police didn’t know whether he’d be the shooter or the victim. That resulted in the city offering him a range of services, but it also put him on the police’s radar -- and that began a chain of events that fulfilled a grim prophecy. The promise of advanced math utilizing increasingly sophisticated data collection grows stronger by the year… but so do its potential perils. Can quantifying a person’s behavior actually te
I analyzed the data and even found an anonymous source inside a state police department who was willing to tell me how car chases really work. The result? We’re doing something that’s bad for everyone, usually for unimportant reasons, with life-changing consequences.
This week on Vsauce2 Mind Blow: Mussels with ridiculous distance, some science education under a fluorescent microscope, and: has science finally come up with a hangover cure?
In this episode of Mind Blow on Vsauce2: scientists have a new hypothesis for why bugs fly around light bulbs, we learn of secret science new virus hiding in baby diapers, in space news Einstein helped discover a massive black hole, a simple drought solution, fruit helping recycle batteries, an ancient Egyptian gifting custom now has physical evidence, a massive leap in MRI brain scan technology, and bioadhesives just got stronger and safer for surgery. The type of science news found only on Mind Blow by Vsauce2.
Vsauce2 dives into the fundamental meaning behind the concept of "happy" and how our twisted modern take on happiness is making things measurably worse. What is the paradox of chasing happiness? And how to things we think will make us happy actually lead to depression?
the ruins of Ancient Rome reveal interesting medical devices, a new humanoid robot learns to be just like you, scientists develop a neural brain implant that works like an octopus, Team Trees might have accidentally grown 20 million computers with wood transistors, Stone Age architectural plans reveal sophisticated abstract cognitive abilities, olfactory virtual reality now includes scents and smells, the Titanic gets 3D mapped with over 700,000 images, which may reveal clues about how the Titanic sank, and the glassy-winged sharpshooter contributes to our biological understanding of fluid dynamics with its built-in butt catapult.
Could one of the staples of a gamer’s diet actually improve physiological health the same way it has for mice and worms? Is it possible to harness plant photosynthesis with a synthetic leaf that mirrors the same chemical process to replace fossil fuels? Will small armies of robot cartographers replace Google Street View cars -- and eventually explore the unknowns of Earth’s oceans? How long have hominins existed in Greece, and are our Mediterranean ancestors hundreds of thousands of years older than we think?
This science research doesn’t just pass the sniff test -- it IS the sniff test. Our olfactory abilities are so refined that our noses can identify a person’s gender with over 96% accuracy from the smell of their… hands?! Robotics is advancing past clumsy limbs and brute force by getting better at both -- this rolling robot that can make deliveries, throw objects, and dynamically adjust its application of force. Sometimes our most advanced scientific discoveries already exist in nature -- like a tiny pill modeled after the pangolin that can roll up to be deployed in internal medicine applications. Oh, and it’s moved around your body by a magnet.
You almost certainly know a psychopath in real life… and you may very well be one yourself. And that might even be a good thing. We’ve recognized psychopathy in science and culture for thousands of years, yet we still don’t know what to do about it. Yet we use the word itself now more than ever, so much that the meaning of the word “psychopath” has become diluted in popular culture. As we increasingly learn more about the science of psychopathy, we should get better at deploying the term more accurately -- but instead, it’s become a catch-all for unconscionable human behavior and a mainstay of true crime stories. Psychopaths are much more complex than that… for better and worse.
You discover a new species of succulent. It’s composed of two tiny butt cheeks. What do you call it? BABY BUM. And there’s really no possible alternative, because this is Mind Blow. An array of 100 robotic muscles that can flex 50 times per second is like a giant fluid trampoline with haptic response that can move and sort objects and also generate images. It’s like a waterbed mixed with a computer. What more could you need?
When we look back on the history of science and scientific progress, we celebrate the pioneers who dared to make life-changing discoveries. The truth is that the first people to introduce a paradigm-shift almost always face persecution, and many are overshadowed by the less-controversial minds who follow them. Such is the case of Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor who fought a lifelong battle against a disease he couldn’t see and that the medical establishment repeatedly told him wasn’t real. How does a scientist or doctor combat bacteria when they don’t even know it exists? The epidemics bacteria, viruses, and germs brought to innocent hospital patients wracked hospitals of the day, but the history of medicine is as much one of complacency and cosmic explanations as it is about breakthroughs.
The most pressing threat to civilization is us -- and paradoxically, we’re also the solution. When Paul Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb” in 1968, he ushered in an era of doomsday predictions that we’re still in. There are more than twice as many people in the world now than when his book came out, and Ehrlich insists that the population bomb just hasn’t gone off yet. But optimists like Julian Simon see something else happening. They acknowledge that man-made threats of destruction are not only challenges we can solve -- and that we’re in a better position every day to eliminate our problems -- but that we’re also better off for it.
There’s more to the story of Trofim Lysenko and the Soviet Union’s most disastrous era of science than you probably realize.
The life, death, and legacy of Russian geneticist Nikolai Vavilov isn’t just one of the most compelling science stories of the 20th century -- it’s a combination of scientific progress, human resilience, and a celebration of both the scientific and human spirits. Vavilov’s tumultuous career in biology and genetics flowed from Vladimir Lenin’s support to Trofim Lysenko’s hostility to Joseph Stalin’s outright persecution. And while Vavilov himself succumbed to Stalin’s scapegoating and purges, his groundbreaking efforts to create a global seedbank for the betterment of mankind inspired his peers to endure suffering beyond comprehension in the service of science. The staff of Vavilov’s plant institute endured the nearly 3-year Siege of Leningrad: no heat, no safety, and most importantly, no sustenance. But while the rest of the city struggled to survive in conditions of starvation, Vavilov’s peers and staff were actually surrounded by the one thing that would keep them alive: food.
As the 20th century approached, our understanding of the natural world and of the cosmos was increasing at a more rapid pace than any time in the history of science. We were building on our knowledge of asteroids, the discovery of Neptune, and understanding the transit of Venus, and science fiction like Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" was taking our imagination deep inside our own planet. But one man rejected the long march of seemingly-irrefutable scientific progress. The cult leader Cyrus Teed was convinced that we weren't living amidst a complex solar system, and that we weren't on top of the Earth at all. Cyrus Teed thought that we were living inside the Earth.
Everyone knows Roald Dahl’s stories, and several generations have grown up on Willy Wonka, Matilda, and more. But lurking behind the Oompa Loompas and the giant peaches is the life of a scientist, an inventor, and a medical pioneer so important that his work has saved thousands of lives worldwide -- and Dahl did his best to make sure you didn’t know it.
Genie Wiley was found in California in 1970, a feral child subjected to 13 years of horrors at the hands of her father -- and her tragic story blurs the line between research and true crime. It's part psychology, part biology, part linguistics... and all a chapter in the dark history of science. Genie presented an incredible opportunity to study the limits of and potential for language acquisition at a time when Noam Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures" dominated linguistic debates. But was it even possible to help an abused girl and study her at the same time? That depends on who you ask -- but the result was limited scientific knowledge and a broken life.
