Six Science Posts #71

Hardcore citizen science, the GPS denoising anniversary and more

Author

Harshal Chhaya
May 04, 2025

Six STEM Tweets

Six tweets that celebrate engineering and all things STEM.

I scroll so you don’t have to.

Today is “Star Wars day” - May the F(=ma) always be with you!

Reacting to the post about plank/Planck in the last issue, KH wrote:

You’re better than I am at this difficult exercise. I can barely make Planck time, the shortest measurable time interval, approximately 5.39 x 10^-44 seconds. 🤣 

#1 🤯 

“Universal Antivenom May Grow Out of Man Who Let Snakes Bite Him 200 Times”

Scientists identified antibodies that neutralized the poison in whole or in part from the bites of cobras, mambas and other deadly species.

🤯 

Another example of breakthrough science coming from an unlikely source

#2 🤯 

That graph? Oof! What a fantastic visualization of a clean signal.

To clarify, GPS was always accurate but the DoD was adding random noise for civilian use to make it less accurate. 25 years ago, they stopped adding the noise. Kudos to the scientists, the engineers and the civil servants who pushed for this change! 👏 

That’s what has enabled everything from Uber Eats to Google maps and more

#3 🤯 

#4 🤯 

Nature is full of examples of the Fibonacci sequence 😃 

#5 🤯 

That’s one loooong-range photo

I am fascinated by the Voyagers. Look for a special Voyager-focused issue soon.

#6 🤯 

Yay \o/

This is issue #71. Is 71 an interesting number? Let’s see:

  • 71 is a prime but also an emirp (“prime” spelled backwards) because 17 is also a prime.

  • It is a Pillai prime, since 9! + 1 is divisible by 71, but 71 is not one more than a multiple of 9. Pillai primes are named after the mathematician Subbayya Sivasankaranarayana Pillai, who studied these numbers

  • 71 is the atomic number of Lutetium, symbol Lu. Lutetium is the last element in the lanthanide series

    (Fellow Asterix fans will note that Lutetium is named after Paris (whose Latin name was Lutetia))

  • There’s no country with 71 as the international calling code. ‘7’ is for Russia and ‘7 1’ is a reserved combination.

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.

- Harshal (@hschhaya on X/Twitter)

That’s it for this issue.

Hit ‘reply’ to tell me what you think.

And hit ‘forward’ to share with your friends and family.

Let’s all celebrate science and engineering and curiosity.

Best wishes,

Harshal