This group has been designated for adults age 18 or older. Please sign in and confirm your date of birth in your profile so we can verify your eligibility. You may opt to make your date of birth private.
Sašo Dolenc's Blog, page 2
March 15, 2020
SARS global outbreak of 2003
On February28, 2003, the local office of the World Health Organization in Hanoi, Vietnam,received a call from a small private hospital with a capacity of no more than60 beds. Two days before, its staff admitted a patient showing symptoms ofatypical flu. To rule out a potential case of “bird flu” they requested thehelp of WHO’s experts to try and determine what the disease really was.
Their callwas answered by Carlo Urbani, an Italian-born contagious disease specialist andDoctors Withou...
When a new, unknown disease breaks out
On February 28, 2003, the local office of the World Health Organization in Hanoi, Vietnam, received a call from a small private hospital with a capacity of no more than 60 beds. Two days before, its staff admitted a patient showing symptoms of atypical flu. To rule out a potential case of bird flu they requested the help of WHOs experts to try and determine what the disease really was.
Their call was answered by Carlo Urbani, an Italian-born contagious disease specialist and Doctors Without...
February 2, 2020
When our sense of probability deceives us
The influence of numerous columns published in popular newspaper supplements where so-called “experts” shower us with all kinds of advice is not to be underestimated. These columns do not only form people’s opinions and change habits of entire nations; every once in a while they can also provoke large-scale polemics involving wider audiences as well as more professional circles. In the area of health and nutrition such fervent reactions are to be expected, but it is a completely different thing ...
October 24, 2018
What is randomness?
You might think it must be easy to define randomness, but nothing could be further from the truth. Not only is it difficult to create random events or sequences of numbers, verifying whether something that we have produced really is random is no easy task either. Many great mathematicians throughout history have examined the problem of randomness, but it was only a short while ago, in the era of computers and information technology, that the questions concerning randomness revealed themselves...
September 14, 2018
Conquering Absolute Zero
At a time when adventurers were still competing to conquer the ice-cold vastness of the North and South Poles, scientists were running a tight race to get as close as possible to absolute zero, the lowest temperature possible, one of just over -273 °C.
Absolute zero is the temperature at which atoms and molecules reach their lowest point of kinetic energy. Even though the absolute zero can never be reached in a laboratory, we can come close. Today, scientists use special techniques to cool do...
September 7, 2018
How Old is Time?
Trying to imagine the beginning of time is just as hard as trying to imagine that time has no beginning. Both possibilities are equally strange and have baffled scholarly minds for centuries. Significant progress in answering this convoluted question was made a little less than 100 years ago when experimental science moved closer to clearing up a seemingly unsolvable problem.
How far away are the stars?The first major discovery that completely changed our image of the universe was made durin...
August 26, 2018
The Power of Uncertainty
Humans generally try to avoid the feelings of uncertainty and ambiguity. We are naturally inclined towards resolving ambiguous situations asap. When we are put in a position that we can’t identify and define within a known set of parameters, our brain desperately tries to make sense of it.
The brain’s first reaction is trying to recognize new patterns while staying open for alternative explanations of situations and events. But in case the problem seems impossible to solve, the brain tries to...
August 19, 2018
Why does digital music only make sense to a human ear?
German acoustics professor Eberhard Zwicker spent years studying the ways humans recognise sounds. After conducting a number of experiments, he reached an important conclusion: a human ear doesn’t abide by the same principles as a microphone. It is a sense organ that became, through evolution, specially adjusted to speech recognition and detecting danger in the natural environment. That’s what makes it efficient in discerning conversations in the buzz of a coffee shop, but not as a universal...
August 17, 2018
The Winner Brain
In Lake Tanganyika in the heart of Africa, there lives an unusual species of fish, Haplochromis burtoni of the cichlid family. It is peculiar for having two varieties of male. One group of males is bright yellow or blue with black stripes around the eyes, while the other is a dull grey, similar in appearance to females of the species.
The main difference between them is that the colourful males are dominant, aggressive and territorial. They belong, as it were, to a kind of fish aristocracy an...
August 16, 2018
Nutrition Trends and the Secret of Healthy Diet
The first industrially prepared baby formula that supposedly contained enough nutrients to replace breast milk successfully was invented in the mid-19th century by German chemist Baron Justus von Liebig. Even though his formula was promoted as a perfect meal, it soon turned out that breast milk wasn’t as easily duplicated as it seemed. The recipe lacked crucial ingredients such as vitamins since their nutritional value still hadn’t been recognised.
The list of known nutrients needed for a chi...
