### Peto’s Paradox, or Why Elephants Do Not Get Cancer? An angel of the STEM Heavens has written our first choice for this week, ladies and gentlemen, read a magnificent post by @scienceangel talking about elephants and… cancer. Why do these cute giants with the long trunks rarely get cancer? Is it their diet? Is it their size? Or is it something hidden deeper inside… their bodies? Now that we got you intrigued, you know what link to click on!

### Are We Born Criminals? Part I: The Positive Theory Look who’s back! No, we’re not talking about the German film, we’re talking about @dysfunctional who has given us one of his great posts again. This is the first part on the topic “Are We Born Criminals?” where he tries to present us with the work of Cesare Lombroso and the Positive Theory in Criminology. An interesting read you shouldn’t miss!

Wednesday - Friday

### Anxiety without reason and it’s relation to fear and stress We are sticking to psychology and a fantastic post by @ideas-abstractas on anxiety. Do you feel under pressure without some specific reason? Does anxiety take over your life once too often and you don’t know what is at fault? Then, you’d definitely enjoy this post as much as we did.

### L’effet Placebo: How Lies Could Heal Our Bodies And we’re moving on to another great piece by @wordswithhoney on the Placebo Effect. No, it is not some side effect from listening to songs by Placebo (the band). This one is a trick that we play on our brains in order to fool our bodies. Wanna know more details? Then read @wordswithhoney’s post straight away!

Saturday - Sunday

### Missile Technology - the weapon of destruction. [1st chapter] For those who love guns and war stories, we have an amazing post by @ied on missile technology. Don’t miss this post if you want to know more about how they work and how many types of missiles there are.

### Spaghetti on the road – Iceland, a song of ice and fire How about a journey to Iceland for our next and last pick for the week? Forces of fire from beneath and ice from above have shaped an island of unique beauty and a combination of features. Follow @spaghettiscience in this beautiful post about Iceland and the stories of its formation.

For some time, the editorial team behind this distilled series is made of a one-woman-team, @ruth-girl, and she chooses her favorite posts (potentially discussing with other curators and/or the management). Posts written by the SteemSTEM team are excluded from the nomination process.

Please do not be discouraged if you did not make it on this issue. We are picking up in total 14 posts a week out of more than 200. The chances are thus low ;) In the meantime, you may wish to check these guidelines for extra tips on how your writing could be more effective.

In the spirit of being transparent about our actions that are now supported by @utopian-io, @curie, our delegators, our trailers and our manual curator supporters, we release every week the list of authors who have caught the attention of the @steemstem curation team.

From July 22 to July 29, we rewarded 126 different authors who have written a total of 164 different articles (there was a Steem blockchain failure during that week). The 89 authors who received votes from @steemstem, @utopian-io and @curie all together that week are:

@abdulmath, @abumaryam, @adetola, @agbona, @ajpacheco1610, @akiripromise, @albatar, @alexander.alexis, @amart29, @amestyj, @asbonclz, @astromaniac, @azulear, @birzannyvs, @boddhisattva, @bodymindsoul, @cathou009, @charlesx, @chloroform, @cleanplanet, @conas, @conficker, @cyprianj, @damzxyno, @drifter1, @effofex, @elocuenciadsnuda, @elvigia, @emperorhassy, @ennyta, @erh.germany, @eurogee, @fancybrothers, @fatin-a-rts, @filotasriza3, @fran.frey, @ftxft, @funmiakinpelu, @germanmontero, @henrychidiebere, @ideas-abstractas, @ied, @ikchris, @isarmoewe, @issavets, @joelagbo, @joseangelvs, @josedelacruz, @josephace135, @khrisaeroth, @latm, @lawkay, @lesshorrible, @lordneroo, @luiscd8a, @lupafilotaxia, @magicquokka, @masterwriter, @menoski, @michaelwrites, @motoengineer, @mountainwashere, @nenio, @njokueruchi, @nonzerosum, @obamike, @olasamuel, @paaddor, @pagliozzo, @pangoli, @paololuffy91, @photoit, @procrastilearner, @rerere, @romulexx, @rscalabrini, @samminator, @sardrt, @scienceblocks, @sciencetech, @sebbbl, @sooflauschig, @soofluffy, @spaghettiscience, @star-vc, @steematlas, @svemirac, @teekingtv, @teemike, @temitayo-pelumi, @tking77798, @tomastonyperez, @torkot, @tsoldovieri, @valth, @viannis, @whentone, @youssef.sed, @zen-art, @zest, @zoneboy, @zonguin

_{[Credits: @hightouch]}

All curation rewards earned will be used to fund @steemstem project functioning and activities.

See you all next MonTuesday!

Up until now, what was shared on Steem; remained on Steem.

This has to change!

From now on, we plan to share SteemSTEM activities on a wider level and share our interests with anyone who writes and cares about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) through our new social media accounts!

We are happy to announce the new Social Media Channels created by SteemSTEM to promote STEM across the borders of Steem.

We invite you to follow and share it with your friends.

New Social Media Accounts

In short, we created new accounts and fully optimized them accordingly to the newest social media standards. If you are on other social media, see below and follow us! Please share with us any remarks, ideas, suggestions!

Facebook Page

You can follow the official Facebook page of Steemstem and get updates about all new trending articles (trending according to our standards) and information on all SteemSTEM activities.

Twitter Account

Some of you may be used to follow Steemstem on Twitter. However, due to an issue with Twitter which would not allow us to log in anymore, a new account needed to be created. So, feel free to follow, from now on, the only official SteemSTEM Twitter account.

Instagram Account

You can also find us on our official Instagram page as well. As for the other social media, this will allow one to get fresh information about the SteemSTEM project, extra promotion for the most supported posts and much more!

What to expect - What is next?

Why write for SteemSTEM?

We realized that the importance of SteemSTEM is greater than simply a niche community to be read by a few on the Steem blockchain. Science communication is a vital force worldwide, yet there is barely enough incentive for researchers to communicate their work to the mainstream audiences.

As a result, only the most positive, groundbreaking and bizarre stories get heard, often misinterpreted or spun in a way not unbefitting of the current culture of ‘fake news’ by mainstream media.

SteemSTEM has a different approach. By offering a space where individual experts and passionate STEM bloggers can freely distribute their knowledge in a social media environment that actively promotes and rewards them, we cut out the middle-men and create a greater balance between quality and readability.

Spreading knowledge is Unlimited knowledge

Especially now, in this age of technological wealth, it is important to tell facts from fiction; it is important to move forward.

_{Florence Nightingale, author Henry Hering (CC0 1.0)}

At the age of 24, Florence told to her parents that she wanted to become a nurse. For the rich ladies of that time, something like that was unthinkable, which was understandable considering unsanitary conditions in hospitals of that time (operations were even performed without the use of anaesthetics!). Moreover, nurses were considered to be the women of questionable morals. Despite her parents’ objections, she visited several hospitals and health institutions. Finally, she managed to obtain her parents’ permission to enrole at a German nursing school for women in Kaiserwerth.

In the early 1850s Florence returned to London where she started a job in the hospital for Sick Gentlewomen in Distressed Circumstances. Shortly her outstanding performance draw the attention of her employer and Nightingale was promoted to superintendant, which was a very challenging position, but at the same time it provided her with the opportunity to implement her own ideas in running the institution.

The Crimean War

Nightingale’s most prominent contribution during her life was certainly in the Crimean war, which broke out in October 1853.

_{The Lady With the Lamp, author Wellcome Collection gallery, CC BY 4.0}

The hospitals at the Crimea were in appalling and unsanitary conditions at the time of the war. Having no stationary female nurses made the whole situation worse, resulting in inadequate medical care for the wounded/sick soldiers and horrible sanitary conditions.

One year after the war started, in October 1854, Florence gathered 38 women volunteer nurses that she personally trained and sailed with them to the Crimea, to help thousands of soldiers who were fighting for their lives. When Nightingale arrived at Scutari, the British base hospital in Constantinople, the image she saw was horrifying - more soldiers were dying from infectious diseases that were the result of inappropriate sanitation than from actual injures obtained in the battlefield.

Besides all the hard work she took on the improving the sanitary conditions of the hospital, she put all her efforts in improving the quality of patients’ stay in the hospital as well. She established a laundry service so that patients could have clean sheets all the time, and she made sure that patients with special dietary requirements would get appropriate food. Moreover, she considered entertainment and intellectual activities equally important for well being of patients, so she introduced classrooms and a library at the hospital.

While she was checking up on patients during the night, she used to walk down the long hallways of the hospital carrying the lamp in her hand, and would approach every single patient to make sure everyone is doing well. That’s how she obtained her nickname The Lady With the Lamp.

_{A Polar-Area Diagram invented by Florence Nightingale, author Florence Nightingale (CC0 1.0)}

Since she obtained an excellent formal education in mathematics, Nightingale calculated the incidence of deaths in the military which could be prevented by improving sanitary conditions. During her work at Scutari hospital, she developed the Polar-Area Diagram to present her results, which later evolved to the pie chart extensively used nowadays. This remarkable approach at the time was actually a pioneer work in the area of measuring particular social phenomena and subjecting it to mathematical analysis.

According to the official statistics, during her year and a half long stay at Scutari, the hospital’s death rate was reduced by two-thirds.

Later achievements

After she returned to England, Nightingale was rewarded by queen Victoria with $250,000 for her amazing contributions and with special engraved brooch which became known as the “Nightingale Jewel”. She used the money to establish St. Thomas’ Hospital, and the Nightingale Training School for Nurses. She was the first woman to be awarded with the Order of Merit in 1907. She died in August 1910, in London, England.

Nightingale’s most prominent contributions by which she is remembered are certainly for being a pioneer of nursing and for introducing reforms in hospital sanitation methods. With her outstanding work, the perception of nursing profession has changed, which started to gain more respect and appreciation.

References

http://www.notablebiographies.com/Mo-Ni/Nightingale-Florence.html https://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/nitegale.htm https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/florence-nightingale https://www.biography.com/people/florence-nightingale-9423539 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale https://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/nightpiechart.htm

### What makes wine cry? Let’s explore from first principle the “Tears of wine” - A case of Marangoni effect Our first pick for the week is a great post by @temitayo-pelumi explaining the effect of “tears of wine”. Yes, wine can cry… or can’t it? You need to read his post to find out what this means!

### The meaning of “Service” and the effects of division of Powers Following next, comes @erh.germany and another beautifully written and extended post of hers. The idea of “service” throughout history, servants and rulers, obediance and commandments, all presented in an enjoyable way. Don’t miss reading this one!

Wednesday - Friday

### A triangular approach to the reason plastic melt in hot oil but not in boiling water Leaving history, we move on to something more “practical” and an amazing post by @olasamuel. Are you among the ones who love to see plastics burn? In this post you can read and learn about the different types of plastics and their melting points. Read that so that next time you’ll know what temperatures you’re gonna need for those plastic spoons and glasses you wanna see melting.

### Brewing without Hops: Genetically engineering yeast to make hoppy flavor Who doesn’t like beer (other than @abigail-dantes, of course)? And who can imagine beer without hops? Apparently, according to @tking77798’s fantastic post, hops might become unnecessary thanks to some genetic modification magic. Wanna learn more about it? Click on that link now!

Saturday - Sunday

### We are relying on ancient rocket engine designs to shoot us into space! Is the Aerospike engine an alternative? @alexdory is famous for his technology posts and this is another one of them! Rocket engine technology is being discussed here: why are we still using remnants of the past and when is an air of innovation going to blow? All that written wonderfully by @alexdory!

### Mind Bending Effect Caused By Toxoplasmosis Might Have Made You Interested To Pursue Business! This week will close with a last gem of the SteemSTEM post pool, @conficker here examines the effects of toxoplasmosis on a person’s behavior. Is it possible that toxoplasmosis can turn people into risk takers? We only have hints and @conficker presents them very well in this piece!

For some time, the editorial team behind this distilled series is made of a one-woman-team, @ruth-girl, and she chooses her favorite posts (potentially discussing with other curators and/or the management). Posts written by the SteemSTEM team are excluded from the nomination process.

Please do not be discouraged if you did not make it on this issue. We are picking up in total 14 posts a week out of more than 200. The chances are thus low ;) In the meantime, you may wish to check these guidelines for extra tips on how your writing could be more effective.

In the spirit of being transparent about our actions that are now supported by @utopian-io, @curie, our delegators, our trailers and our manual curator supporters, we release every week the list of authors who have caught the attention of the @steemstem curation team.

From July 15 to July 22, we rewarded 126 different authors who have written a total of 154 different articles (there was a Steem blockchain failure during that week). The 116 authors who received votes from @steemstem, @utopian-io and @curie all together that week are:

@abdulmath, @abigail-dantes, @adetola, @agbona, @ajpacheco1610, @akiripromise, @anaestrada12, @ancolie, @anyes2013, @ari16, @astromaniac, @azulear, @ceruleanblue, @chloroform, @clement.poiret, @conficker, @crunchymomqc, @cryptogee, @cryptoitaly, @cyprianj, @davinci.witness, @dber, @deathbatter, @delpilar, @dexterdev, @elvigia, @emiliomoron, @emily61, @emperorhassy, @eniolw, @eurogee, @felixrodriguez, @flurgx, @fran.frey, @fredrikaa, @ftxft, @gammastern, @getencored, @giornalista, @henrychidiebere, @herbayomi, @heros, @hogarcosmico, @horpey, @ideas-abstractas, @ikchris, @insight-out, @irelandscape, @isarmoewe, @jaki01, @jfermin70, @joelagbo, @josedelacruz, @josephace135, @kingabesh, @kurtein24k, @lauch3d, @lawkay, @lemony-cricket, @lordneroo, @lorenzor, @luiscd8a, @lupafilotaxia, @masterwriter, @michaelwrites, @miroslavrc, @misterufem, @mr-aaron, @mr-sakariyau, @mrbreeziewrites, @nonzerosum, @pagliozzo, @pangoli, @phage93, @photonenblende, @procrastilearner, @rareghost, @rerere, @rexdickson, @reyvaj, @rharphelle, @rifkan, @romualdd, @romulexx, @samminator, @scienceangel, @scienceblocks, @sciencetech, @sebbbl, @sooflauschig, @starrichie, @stemng, @sunkanmi02, @teemike, @terrylovejoy, @thurllanie, @tomastonyperez, @torkot, @tystnad, @ulisesfl17, @viannis, @whentone, @writeit, @youssef.sed, @yusvelasquez, @zest

_{[Credits: @hightouch]}

All curation rewards earned will be used to fund @steemstem project functioning and activities.

See you all next MonTuesday for a new distilled!

The Virgo Interferometer is something spectacular. With two arms 3km in length, it’s one of the biggest machines ever made in the history of the world, behind things like LIGO and the LHC. All for science.

But some mysterious figure didn’t just come up with it one day and had it approved for construction the next, the journey atop giants’ shoulders was long and wrought with complicated maths people like me could never hope to understand.

Today I thought it would be worthwhile putting some time aside to learn a little more about some of the giants who constructed this monolithic structure with the power of their brains - Einstein aside.

Henri Poincaré

_{Public Domain}

A long, long time ago around 240BC, the Greek poet (also mathematician I guess) Eratosthenes decided to shove a stick in the ground in Alexandria, Egypt, and made another man travel to Southern Egypt to shove another stick in the ground there.

By measuring the difference in shadows at the same time of day, he managed to figure out that the earth was round, and how big it was to surprising accuracy of between 1% and 16% (depending on how you measure ‘stadia’), roughly around 44,100 km. Quite an accomplishment given we now know it’s about 40,075.017km. Give or take.

Though Eratosthenes managed to prove something he could not possibly see for himself - indeed we could not possibly see until space agencies took us into the Great Void Above - Poincaré decided he could essentially take this one step further do the same thing with the entire Universe.

We call this the Poincaré Conjecture, for which he is most famous. You can Learn more about it in this video, but in short it took over a century of people coming up with false proofs for his outlandish idea to inevitably become proven by an eccentric, isolated Russian, Grisha Perelman who went on to turn down a million dollars and the equivalent of a nobel prize, the Fields Medal, before fading back into obscurity.

But Poincaré is also responsible for first proposing the existence of gravitational waves, 11 years before Einstein made his predictions, something that both LIGO and VIRGO slipped up on in a publication a few years back, instead attributing to Einstein.

By building on the theory of special relativity and the Lorentz Transformations, he concluded that gravitation must emanate outwards, at the speed of light rather than instantaneously, as waves do - in a similar fashion to Electromagnetism.

A decade later, Einstein incorporated these ideas into his paper Approximative Integration of the Field Equations of Gravitation.

_References

_{Sur la dynamique de l’électron | Henri Poincaré Predicted The Existence Of Gravitational Waves As Early As June 5, 1905}

Oliver Heaviside

_{Public Domain}

So Poincaré was the first, except… he wasn’t really.

Oliver Heaviside was a rather brilliant Englishman, having self-taught electrical engineering, mathematics, physics and more.

He was no mathematical amateur either. After stumbling upon Maxwell’s paper Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. and describing it as:

Great, greater and greatest, with prodigious possibilities in its power

He buckled down for the better part of a decade studying Maxwell’s work with passion until finally following his own path.

In 1893, a full 23 years before Einstein’s predictions, Heaviside made some pretty bold deductions. In his paper A Gravitational and Electromagnetic analogy, he wanted to align gravitational energy with the likes of electric and magnetic energies a la Maxwell.

Upon considering velocity of propagation as finite, he continued his comparisons and concluded, roughly, the existence of gravitational waves.

_References

_{The Prediction of Gravitational Waves in 1893 | The Secret History of Gravitational Waves}

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Ok, so the idea that gravitation traveled at finite speeds was hardly new, with Laplace discussing this idea as far back as 1770. Numerous others had also touched on this, but the ideas, far from refined, required Poincaré and eventually Einstein to truly hammer home the details.

In fact, it was Einstein alone who made the tangible, accurate predictions alongside details of their expected properties, such as how the waves wilil exhibit stretching in one direction and compressing in the other, much like sound waves and light, but way more complicated regarding the manipulation of space-time.

But where’s the proof?

Introducing:

Kip Thorne, Barry Barish & Rainer Weiss

In 2017, these three lads won the nobel prize in Physics for the ‘decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves’!

In 1984, the three co-founded the LIGO project in the US, and suddenly those elusive gravitational waves were about to lose their hiding spot. All of Einstein/Poincaré/Heaviside/Laplace’s work was falling into place.

The workload was not a light one. Kip Thorne, for example, had to develop the mathematics in order to even be able to analyse the results should the experiment work, he had to analyse engineering designs that couldn’t conceptually be tested beforehand, he helped identify wave sources, provide theoretical support, he designed the beam tubes, and invented ‘quantum nondemolition designs’ and ways to reduce thermoelastic noise.

All in a day’s work!

Kip Thorne Credit: A. T. Service - CC BY-SA 3.0

On top of that, he even managed to squeeze in enough time to be the science advisor for Christopher Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’ - a movie that depicts the most scientifically accurate black hole known to date - a full 2 years before signatures of gravitational waves were officially detected.

_References

_{nobelprize.org | Kip Thorne}

And here we are now, in 2018 (that is also the beginning of what is coined the gastrophysics era), a world where gravitational waves are a definitely real thing that we can almost touch with our bare hands. Ok, not quite. Detecting one of these waves is the equivalent of noticing the Milky Way stretched out about the length of your keyboard’s delete key.

But we can touch the machines capable of doing that at say, oh I don’t know, the SteemSTEM-Utopian.io meetup in Italy in September!

This page is synchronized from the post: Gravitational waves - from proposals to observations