Category: science

Mapping the Minds of Search & RecSys: A Comprehensive Directory | August 10 2026, 03:56

84 researchers, 40+ laboratories — who’s who in Search & RecSys, all on one page.

https://www.testmysearch.com/who-is-who.html

Google, Meta, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, CMU, UMass, UCSD, and others — for each person links to their website, Google Scholar, LinkedIn, key papers. Plus the h-index and number of citations from Semantic Scholar.

Made it for myself, because it’s more convenient to quickly see who publishes what. Couldn’t find anything ready-made — had to compile it myself. Seems useful, I hope not only to me.

https://www.testmysearch.com/who-is-who.html

https://www.testmysearch.com/who-is-who.html

Exploring the Depths of Unicode’s Complex Symbols | August 09 2026, 12:22

It’s amazing that Unicode includes such complex “characters” as shown in the picture. This is a single character. When the Unicode table had accommodated all the alphabets of the world, arrows, circles, and there was still a ton of free space left that needed filling, the capacity was used up. It has space for about 1.1 million characters, and font designers are doing their best) Chinese and Korean occupy 71% of the existing characters.

Also, Unicode includes some cool ligatures. For example, the following text is one “character” ﷽ (Basmala). Here on Facebook, it doesn’t display quite right because of the fonts, the full version can be seen here: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%EF%B7%BD where ﷺ and ﷻ also live

Moreover, Unicode includes hieroglyphs that do not exist. An investigation in 1997 discovered, for example, the origin of 妛: the compilers wanted to record “山 over 女,” but could not print the composite sign — so they printed 山 and 女 separately, cut them out with scissors, glued them on a sheet and made a copy. On the copy, the seam line of the two pieces of paper looked like a stroke and was included in the hieroglyph. Now it remains so forever

A Close Encounter with a Giant Horsefly: Insights and Discoveries | August 05 2026, 01:33

I just had a huge, about three and a half centimeters across, loud buzzing black fly come into my room. I caught it with a blanket and shoved it into a vase, inspected it closely and Googled it. It turned out to be a black horsefly (Tabanus atratus), female. The females are vampires. They need fresh blood. For the eggs. And their bites are very painful. Essentially, a horsefly’s mouth is like scissors. A pair of serrated mandibles which they use to saw into the skin, opening up capillaries, and then they lick up the blood from the resulting pool. It’s said that their bites hurt a lot because you are literally being cut by these scissors. An anticoagulant is injected into the blood to prevent it from clotting, so the wound oozes for a long time after the horsefly has flown away. They can easily bite through fabric, so a shirt offers no protection.

So, it turns out that horseflies are possibly the fastest flying insects on the planet. Males of the genus Hybomitra (which also live here) are credited with speeds up to 145 km/h, and this, by some estimates, is the record for horizontal flight among insects (though this figure is indirectly obtained: an entomologist made a male chase a bullet shot from an air rifle, it intercepted it in the air, meaning it was flying faster than the pellet). Furthermore, horseflies are attracted to polarized light. This is how they find water — a smooth surface reflects light horizontally polarized, and for the horseflies, this is a beacon “here you can lay eggs”. Interestingly, this is also why white horses get significantly fewer bites, because they almost do not polarize reflected light. For these experiments, Gabor Horvat and his colleagues received the 2016 Ig Nobel Prize. Among other things, they smeared full-size horse models with glue and painted dummies to thoroughly check everything.

By the way, I released my captive.

Exploring Science and Myth through the Engineering Zen Group | August 03 2026, 15:37

I remind you that I have a group called Engineering Zen on Facebook and Telegram. Recently, there have been posts about:

– How for half a century science condescendingly explained to grandmothers that colds are caused by viruses, not drafts, — and in 2022, it found a mechanism by which grandmothers were partly right.

– People who are currently walking around with plutonium in their chests. Legally, registered with the nuclear regulator, with the instruction “to be returned to the state after death.” The capsule was seriously tested: cremation, plane crash, shotgun blast. It wasn’t radiation that killed the technology.

– Old sailors who poured oil overboard during storms. Not superstition, but working physics — and from it emerged, it seems, the first measurement of the size of a molecule in history. A teaspoon of oil, a pond under London, and Benjamin Franklin. Today, the same effect captures oil spills from satellites.

– Why almost all blue in the animal world is a deception: there’s no pigment at all. Neither in the wings of the morpho butterfly, nor in the feathers of a peacock, nor in your blue eyes. Mammals do not have any blue pigment. But it’s the opposite in plants.

– How the ocean floor is mapped… by looking at its surface from space. Underwater mountains betray themselves through “bumps” on the water — it turns out the sea is not flat at all. Only about a quarter of the sea floor has been measured with a sonar to this day.

– The MRI magnet, which is turned on only once in a lifetime — and then it circles current through a ring for years, without any socket. Even at night, when the clinic is closed. But if the cooling fails — a “quench” occurs, and tons of helium burst out through the pipe to the roof within seconds.

– The theorem by which a sphere can be cut into pieces and assembled into two identical spheres. Not a trick or sophistry — honest mathematics. The catch is that these “pieces” have no volume. At all. Like the coast of Britain has no length.

– Why in a language with three words for colors, the third is always red, and blue appears last. No need to know the language — just count. And why the go signal on Japanese traffic lights is legally “blue.”

– A rescue operation going on in space right now: a robot trying to catch a falling telescope, which has neither handles nor a docking unit — it was built in an era when no one thought of such things. Racing against the atmosphere.

– Lunar dust — the main nightmare of lunar bases. Microscopic sharp glass shards that eat away space suits within hours, stick to everything due to static, and — surprisingly — smell like gunpowder.

– A hypothesis that lasted 85 years and fell during the World Cup final — from a single line on Twitter. A counterexample is verified by a student in a minute, and it’s unclear why it wasn’t found earlier.

– The illusion of “stopped clocks,” which everyone has experienced: you shift your gaze to the second hand — and it has stopped. It turns out, the brain blinds you several times a second — and then edits time retrospectively.

– Ice that does not melt at +300°C — found trapped inside diamonds from the Earth’s mantle. And its even more strange black superheated relative seems to make up the interiors of Uranus and Neptune.

– Why the ads on the stadium boards, which you see on television, physically do not exist — viewers in Brazil, Germany, and Japan see three different sponsors at the same moment.

– A piece of wire mesh that tames fire where it is bound to explode — and on which the entire century of mining labor stood. The inventor gave it to the world for free.

– And for dessert — why a giant NASA rocket is transported not on asphalt, but on river pebbles. They tried asphalt — it went “in waves, like the sea.” Personally verified, I spent an hour looking at that gravel out the window.

Join us to not miss much more interesting stuff.

Engineering Zen

P.S. There is also a group in Telegram with the same name, but there the audience has stopped growing at all and stands at about 100 people, and until I figure out how to manage this, I am temporarily giving up on it.

Grandmothers Partially Right: The Cold Truth About Catching Colds | August 02 2026, 21:03

HEY, for half a century, science condescendingly explained to grandmothers that a cold is caused by a virus, not a draft, and in 2022 found the mechanism by which the grandmothers were right after all (partly).

Background: Salisbury, 1946-1990, Common Cold Unit, 20,000 people went through it – they were infected with cold viruses and frozen (cold baths, drafts, wet swimsuits). They did not get sick more often. Next – Douglas’s work in 1968. There were 44 people, all given rhinovirus, one group sat at 4°C. No difference was found, and the article was titled “Failure to demonstrate effect”. The conclusion spread through popular books – cold has no relation to getting a cold, period.

New: In December 2022, they published the mechanism. In short. The nasal mucosa has a frontline (only discovered in 2018). Sensing a pathogen, cells throw extracellular vesicles into the nasal mucus – the authors describe this as “kicking a wasp nest”. These vesicles feature the same receptors that the virus latches onto, denser than on the cells themselves – it sticks to the dummy and doesn’t reach the cell. Then the experiment – 15 minutes at 4.4°C – and the temperature inside the nose drops by 5°C. On tissue cooled just the same, nearly 42% fewer vesicles are thrown, antiviral microRNAs in each are halved, and up to 70% fewer receptors.

Conclusion: “getting a cold from cold” is wrong, but “easier to get infected in the cold if there is someone to catch it from” is very much so. The most interesting part is what they want to make out of this. Since the swarm can be summoned, the authors discuss a spray that commands the mucosa to “kick the wasp nest” in advance.

The Future of Fiction: Satire and Automation in “The Silver Eggheads” | July 20 2026, 16:48

I came across the book “The Silver Eggheads” (1961) by Fritz Leiber—a satirical novel about the future of literature, featuring “wordmills” and, darn it, so many parallels with what is being done now.

In the novel, wordmills are enormous machines that have completely replaced writers in the production of fiction. They mechanically “grind” words, producing an endless stream of novels—a so-called “wordwooze”, a product perfectly tailored to the tastes of the mass reader. It causes almost narcotic pleasure: the reader swallows the book and immediately forgets its content, remaining hungry for the next one.

Human writers in the novel still exist, but purely decoratively. They don’t write a single line—they only “service” the wordmills (by pressing buttons) and maintain a public image: they wear bohemian outfits, live in attics, stir up scandals, start affairs—all that the public expects from a “real writer.” Writing has turned into show business and cosplay, while creativity itself is left to machines.

Writers, imagining that they truly can write, rise up and destroy the wordmills. And then a catastrophe is revealed: none of them can compose anything readable—the skill has been lost for generations. The publishing industry panics, searching for a solution.

That’s when the titular Silver Eggheads come into play—preserved human brains in egg-shaped metal containers, brains of writers and thinkers of the past, stored for decades in the “Wisdom of Ages.” The publishers hope that these brains will be able to write books again. The Eggheads, however, having become rather snide and peculiar entities over years of pure contemplation, don’t rush to cooperate.

The plot then turns into a whirlpool of intrigues around these thirty brains—they suddenly become the only “productive asset” in the entire publishing industry.

Meanwhile, the main trouble becomes clear: the Eggheads do not want to write. Two hundred years of pure thought have turned them into haughty contemplators—to them, human novels are trivial and petty. The first attempts to make them write yield either mockeries or texts so strange that they are unsellable. The characters eventually realize that the Eggheads need not orders but motivation: experiences, sensations, participation in life.

Funny book, I should read it sometime.

Exploring the Scorching, Solid Ice of Alien Worlds | July 17 2026, 14:56

There exists ice that does not melt even at hundreds of degrees, and it seems that entire planets stand on it. Under normal pressure, ice has to be cold. But if you compress water tens of thousands of times stronger than atmospheric pressure, the molecules have nowhere to go, and the pressure itself compresses them into a crystalline lattice, causing the water to “freeze,” even while being scalding hot. Not supercooled, not tricky—just simultaneously solid and hot. It’s called “Ice VII”. At a pressure of about 10 GPa, it remains a crystal at temperatures above +300°C.

This type of ice has been found in nature. In 2017, its tiny crystals were discovered locked inside diamonds that had been lifted from the depths of the Earth’s mantle—the water was sealed in there under monstrous residual pressure. And if you compress and heat water even more—to hundreds of GPa and thousands of degrees—it transitions into an even more bizarre phase: superionic ice. Oxygen atoms sit in a rigid lattice while protons flow freely through it like a fluid. This ice conducts electricity and, according to calculations, appears black and incandescent. It was momentarily produced in the laboratory with laser shock waves, and models suggest that significant portions of the interiors of Uranus, Neptune, and many “water” exoplanets are composed of it—this particularly explains their strange, skewed magnetic fields.

Our domestic experience of “ice = cold” is a narrow special case at one atmosphere of pressure. Science already knows about twenty crystalline forms of ice, and in the interiors of planets, water can easily be both solid and hot at the same time.

Engineering Zen: Mind-Bending Science and History Revealed | July 13 2026, 16:16

Reminding you that I have an Engineering Zen group on Facebook and Telegram. Recently, there have been posts about:

– The British plan to build an aircraft carrier… out of ice. Measuring 600 meters in length — the largest ship in history. Material scientists found an additive that makes ice as strong as concrete. A prototype was actually built — its remnants still lie at the bottom of a Canadian lake.

– The fact that no one really knows why a bicycle doesn’t fall over. For a century and a half, textbooks offered two beautiful explanations — until in 2011 they built a bicycle that disabled both effects. By all laws, it should fall over. Yet, it rides.

– How the military communicates with submarines through the depth of salty water, where radio waves cannot penetrate. The Americans nearly turned 40% of the state of Wisconsin into an antenna, while the Soviet system used the Earth’s crust itself as an antenna. Efficiency — megawatts in, a couple of watts out. And that’s enough for almost the entire globe.

– That very rotor with blades behind glass, which has been explained incorrectly for 150 years. Maxwell was initially pleased — but then they noticed it spins the wrong direction. The correct answer is much trickier, and it specifically requires a “non-ideal” vacuum.

– Why a fridge magnet sticks only on one side, and barely on the other. It turns out, it’s the same trick used to focus beams in particle accelerators. And it has a very non-obvious “flip side.”

– The “Silicon Lottery”: chips from the same production line turn out different, and your processor might just be a flawed model of a higher-end version with blocks disabled. And in the 90s, there was a coprocessor that, upon installation, simply switched off the main processor and worked instead.

– Undersea cables that carry the entire internet: as thick as a garden hose, under 20 kilovolts, amplifying light directly with light — no electricity involved. And why traders are willing to pay for the fact that light in fiber is “too slow.”

– The Hoover Dam, inside which nearly 1000 km of piping is hidden — otherwise, the concrete would have taken 125 years to set and it would have cracked from tension. It was cooled with an on-site ice plant.

– And for dessert — the fact that trolleybuses, electric cars, faxes, drones, video calls, and even humanoid robots are much older than you think. One of the robots walked, talked 700 words, counted with his fingers, and smoked. In 1939. Seems we’re just dusting off the past.

Join us to not miss much more interesting stuff.

“Engineering Zen”, Engineering Zen and on Telegram t.me/engineersdzen