Lord of the tree rings

Trees are outstanding historians. In fact, scientists dating back to Leonardo da Vinci recognized the value of trees. While others had figured out that you could determine the age of a tree by counting its growth rings, da ...

Mathematics of scale: Big, small and everything in between

Breathe. As your lungs expand, air fills 500 million tiny alveoli, each a fraction of a millimeter across. As you exhale, these millions of tiny breaths merge effortlessly through larger and larger airways into one ultimate ...

Leonardo da Vinci's take on dynamic soaring

Although Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is known to have studied bird flight, few people realise that he was the first to document flight maneuvers, now called dynamic soaring. Birds use these maneuvers to extract energy from ...

Fullerene spheres can be used to slide in the nanoworld

"Nano–machines" (around one billionth of a metre in size) of the future will need tiny devices to reduce friction and make movement possible. The C60 molecule, also known as fullerene or buckyball, seemed to many an excellent ...

Moving furniture in the micro-world

When moving furniture, heavy objects are easier to move if you rotate them while pushing. Many people intuitively do this. An international research team from Konstanz (Germany), Trieste and Milan (Italy) has now investigated ...

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