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- Six Science Posts #68
Six Science Posts #68
Frequency hopping fish, so many strawberries and more
Harshal Chhaya
April 06, 2025
Six STEM Tweets
Six tweets that celebrate engineering and all things STEM.
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#1 🤯
Niels Bohr’s groundbreaking paper proposing a new atomic model, 'On the constitution of atoms and molecules' is dated 5 April 1913. It was published in July of the same year.
Bohr was awarded the #NobelPrize in Physics in 1922.
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize)
7:15 AM • Apr 5, 2025
Neil’s Bohr has one of the most bad-ass quotes ever. And that too to Einstein. 🤯
“Stop telling God what to do with his dice.”
#2 🤯
fucking insane. some fish use electrical signals to navigate; if two fish on the same frequency encounter each other, they automatically switch frequencies to avoid "signal jamming" each other. exactly like how your wifi router does at home. wow.
— meatball times (@meatballtimes)
4:27 AM • Apr 3, 2025
Frequency hopping fish!
#3 🤯
The Google trend search query for the“quadratic formula.” It literally repeats the same pattern every year. Down in summer, up in spring, down in winter, and up in spring. 👀
— Abakcus (@abakcus)
4:43 PM • Apr 2, 2025
The pattern follows the school year almost perfectly. In this case, the correlation is the causation.
#4 🤯
I'm in a Telegram channel where someone discovered the password to NASA's mars rover is "Mars2020!" It's been doing donuts for the last hour...
— Jack Rhysider 🏴☠️ (@JackRhysider)
6:02 PM • Apr 1, 2025
The ! makes it secure.
(See post #6 below for another take on the ! - this time from a math perspective)
#5 🤯
The circle contains 360 degrees because ancient Babylonians, using their base-60 numerical system, observed the roughly 365-day solar year and chose 360 as a mathematically convenient approximation.
360 is rich in factors and made calculations easier. The connection between
— Fermat's Library (@fermatslibrary)
1:33 PM • Apr 4, 2025
France sometimes uses “gradians” as a measurement of angle - and in that system a circle has 400 gradians. A right angle is 100 gradians.
It’s very metric but never caught on more widely. Maybe because 360 has so many factors and is easily divisible.
#6 🤯
😆
Math is all around us 😄
! is the mathematical notation for factorial - which is the product of all positive integers less than or equal to a given integer, meaning you multiply that number by all the numbers below it down to 1
So 22! equals 22 × 21 × 20 × 19 …. × 2 × 1 - which is a LOT of strawberries 😃
About
This newsletter is my way of sharing interesting science-related news with my curious friends. I enjoy finding science and math connections in our world.
Please share this newsletter with others. Let’s encourage curiosity.
This is issue #68. Here’s a few ways in which 68 is an interesting number:
68 is the largest known number to be the sum of two primes in exactly two different ways: 68 = 7 + 61 = 31 + 37. All higher even numbers that have been checked are the sum of three or more pairs of primes
One of 68’s factorization is:
4×((4×4) + 1)
As a decimal number, 68 is the last two-digit number to appear for the first time in the digits of pi. (Can anyone explain this to me? Thanks!)
68 is a “happy” number, meaning that repeatedly summing the squares of its digits eventually leads to 1:
68 → 62 + 82 = 100 → 12 + 02 + 02 = 1.
In the restaurant industry, 68 may be used as a code meaning "put back on the menu", being the opposite of 86 which means "remove from the menu".
68 is the atomic number of Erbium - symbol Er, a silvery-white solid metal when artificially isolated. It was originally found in the gadolinite mine in Ytterby, Sweden, which is the source of the element's name.
There is no country with an international calling code of 68.
That’s it for this issue.
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Let’s all celebrate science and engineering and curiosity.
Best wishes,
Harshal