By Teresa Behl Imagine the following experiment: Shoot 10,000 soccer balls at a wall with a narrow door. Where do you expect the balls to first hit the walls in the room behind the door? Most people would expect a pile or central culmination of hits at the back wall and would be right about that. The ball…
Maxwell’s equations
By Luca Fiorani Maxwell’s equations are, without any doubt, one of the immortal monuments of physics. You can write them on a bar bill, yet they explain all electromagnetic phenomena, from the operation of your smartphone, to the magnetic field of neutron stars. As usual in science, they are not the sudden achievement of a…
Trees too collaborate
By Catherine Belzung Sometimes, when walking in a forest, I am wondering: how is it possible that two trees that are very close one to the other survive? If they were competing for resources, only one should survive. Also, how is it possible that small trees, that do not receive natural light because of the…
A multi-layered reality
By Antonino Puglisi Along our journey through Wonderverse we have showcased so many different faces of the beauty and relational character of the natural world we live in. From the intricate workings of our brains and its connection to happiness to the sophisticated mechanism of pollination of wasps and fig flowers, from the beauty behind chemical…
Color as spectral relationship
By Ján Morovič Looking at the world around us, we can see a myriad of colors. Some bright – others dark, some vivid – others dull, some warm – others cool. We see colors like red, vermillion, pink, orange, salmon, ochre, green, teal, navy, purple, grey, black and white and it is often hard to…
Generosity increases happiness
By Catherine Belzung When considering all the examples of altruism that can be found throughout nature, and having in mind the wars and violence that frequently occur among human beings, one can come to the following question: is there evidence that humans are designed to cooperate? And if the answer is yes, then why is…
Together we live better: fig flowers and the wasps that pollinate them
By Stefania Papa Figs have a unique characteristic. Since their flowers bloom internally, they need a special process for pollination. They cannot simply rely on the wind or bees to spread their pollen, instead it is a specific creature that does so: the fig wasp Blastophaga psenes. Figs and fig wasps have a special relationship that…
What is the mass of a physical body?
By Daniele Spadaro By nature, the gravitational force, which manifests itself as a mutual attraction between physical bodies, is proportional to the amount of their mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. The inertia of a physical body, that is the resistance it opposes to a force that tends to move…
Cooperation and altruism in social amoeba
By Teresa Behl Slime molds have an image problem despite their extraordinary talents. This blogpost aims to contribute to improving the reputation improvement of slime molds by introducing the Dictyostelium discoideum — a social amoeba famous in altruism research — that easily passes the boundary between unicellular (single-celled) and multicellular organisms during its life cycle….
Two different principles within the same material
By Lucian Pasieka In nature, there are materials that consist of a variety of individual structures (molecular chains), which only demonstrate their desired characteristics as coupled systems. An example of this kind in the field of mechanics is the interplay between elastic and damping components. In the human body, elasticity and damping are coupled in…
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