How do the boats of theAmerica’s Cup to “fly” on the water? It may seem incredible, but these boats long 21 meters, 5 meters wideheavy 6.9 tons (including the crew), can rise more than a metre from the sea and reach impressive speeds, up to 100 km/husing only the wind. The secret behind this “magic” are foils, advanced technological wings ...
Latrodectus tredecimguttatus (bad mincemeat). Credit: Onofrio Panzarino, via Wikimedia Commons There Malmignatta or Black Widow (Latrodectus tredecimguttatus) together with the Violin Spider (Red-bellied Loxosceles) is one of the two species of spiders present in Italy whose bite can cause symptoms of a certain medical importance. This spider is found in mainly dry, stony and arid areas for example between walls ...
The sculpture of the great winged lion in bronze that has guarded for centuries St. Mark’s Square and the whole lagoon of Venice, positioned at the apex of a column facing the sea called precisely the Column of San Marco, may not actually be Venetian, but Chinese. Moreover, it probably does not even depict a lion. The study of two ...
«Hi, I hope I’m not bothering you! I need your help for…». If you receive a WhatsApp message that has a incipit of this kind and which comes from numbers with foreign prefixes – for example +62 (Indonesia), +370 (Lithuania), +223 (Mali), +84 (Vietnam) – be careful, as you could fall victim to a cybercriminal. In fact, these days there ...
The September 16, 2023 a huge landslide broke away from Dickson Fjord, in a remote area of the Greenland north-easterncaused a megatsunamithat is, a very violent tsunami. A recent study by German researchers from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and the Institute for Geosciences at the University of Potsdam has clarified the dynamics of the phenomenon by analyzing ...
Have you ever looked at someone’s face and said, for example, “You really have the face of Giovanni!“? Well, you should know that a 2024 study, conducted by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has actually investigated the possible correspondence between people’s first names and their facial appearance. In other words, the researchers wondered if there really is a tendency for ...
According to estimates, in Italy there would be between 300 thousand and 400 thousand surnames different, compared to a population of just over 59 million people. In Chinasince they live there 1.37 billion individualswe could therefore expect a few million different surnames. Instead, this is not the case at all, on the contrary: according to the Chinese Ministry of Public ...
Exactly 16 years have passed since September 15, 2008, when the American LehmanBrothersthe world’s fourth largest bank, said bankruptcygiving way to the largest banking failure in history (or, as some economists put it at the time, simply “a huge catastrophe”). The causes of the financial collapse of this major bank – explained in a superb way by Adam McKay’s Oscar-winning ...
The expression “go full speed ahead” is used to indicate an action performed at great speed. Its origin, however, is less obvious than it seems. Despite what one might think, “go full speed ahead” it would have nothing to do with beer as a drink or with its consumption. In fact, its history leads us towards a curious linguistic evolution ...
If you are firmly convinced that the acronym Wi-Fiis the abbreviation of Wireless Fidelityyou have to think again because in reality Wi-Fi has nothing to do with “wireless fidelity” (a term that by the way makes no sense). Much more simply this acronym, which refers to a set of technologies for exchanging data between wireless devices, It was chosen for ...