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The First Detectives in Fiction

In the history of humanity, the complexity of solving riddles of big crimes, ordinary felonies, and even simple misdemeanors in growing western society has become more difficult with the fast development of large cities of the 19th century. This was the time when first detective agencies were founded, initially in Paris by Eugène François Vidocq, a convicted criminal who, in his inspirational life, switched the side of the law and turned into a criminalist career, followed by 'Bow Street Runners', the very first police detective force in London, and first detective units in Boston and Chicago with Allan Pinkerton, the famous owner of the most memorable private detective agency in the history of the United States. There is no doubt that many actual events from western criminology from the early 19th century heavily influenced first modern detective stories from the time. The very first one in this genre is widely attributed to Edgar Allan Poe and his short story "The ...

Adventurous Travels for 6th Graders

Geographically lying in the heart of the Balkan peninsula, the small town of Svrljig is acting as the capital of a relatively small Serbian land surrounded by exactly 38 villages that are, demographically speaking, living their lives on the edge of extinction. In just half a century, the human population of the area is more than halved, with more and more 'haunted-like' villages containing more empty houses than those with smoked winter chimneys, in which more people die than are born. The past of the area went through numerous changes over time and was pretty colorful, to say the least. Like everywhere else, ever since the written literacy spread its wings only millennium ago, the history of Svrljig is pretty well documented ever since the great Schism of the 11th century, and we pretty much know what it was like to live here down to that time. But history goes even further in the past—to those times we know little about and all we have is a ruin here and there we can tr...

Fairies of Naissus

In pre-Christian mythologies of the western and northern tribes and their pagan beliefs, female deities were not uncommon. Take, for instance, old Gaul's Matres or Valkyries of the old Norse mythology and, of course, all the goddesses from the history of all polytheistic religions around the globe. But perhaps the most interesting of them all are, you guessed, the fairies. They are not actually deities per se and rather belong to the spirit realm of the afterlife and dead, but still you can find them, in one form or another, in almost all religious legends and myths. The city where I was born, the valley it resides in, and the river that splits it in half are no different. The history of this area is, metaphorically speaking, very colorful and full of wonders, all the way to the beginning of the Neolithic era, and over the centuries this valley literally saw lots of different cultures and deities. One of them dates way back to the Celtic Gauls and their tribe named Scordisci, who l...

The Genetics of Human Behavior

Genetics is, relatively speaking, a very young science. After the discovery of DNA only a couple of decades ago, it stopped being solely a statistical and psychological study of heredity, and ever since then it has been given a very important component in its labs: a microscope. In simple words, we are now able to dive more deeply into the world of genes and their government of the human body and behavior. In this short time we learned a great deal of human genetics and how it works. Many genes are already identified in relation to how we act and interact with others and our environment. Let's discuss some of them that already earned cool nicknames in relation to what they are capable of or what we think and suspect they do. The mixture of genes we own is given to us by our parents, which they inherited from their parents, who were gifted with the same from their own mothers and fathers, and so on. What is finally our DNA composed of? It basically defines us and not just our looks ...

Iron Man

In old Serbian folklore, there was one very interesting fairy tale with one very unusual character for the time it was first told. In short, it goes like this: "Once upon a time, there was a king who ordered his three sons to get married in the most unusual way. All three of them were supposed to shoot arrows, and from where they landed, the emperor would pick the most beautiful girls to be their brides. Needless to say, the youngest's arrow ended far away from the city and flew right into the old well, just next to the ugly greenish frog. Well, the deal in fairy tales always goes all the way, and not surprisingly, the frog soon became his wedding wife." "And just like in a typical fairy tale, the frog eventually turned into the most beautiful girl in the entire kingdom and almost immediately became the person of envy for all royalties, especially the queen and all the other princesses. This never went well in old stories, and soon after the young prince was gi...

Choosing Planets

Let's turn our imagination to the edge and do something different today. We can call it thought experiment, childish game, daydream, science fiction, pure fantasy, or whatever we want, but let's move the boundaries far away from Earth, far away from our solar system, even farther from our galaxy, and do something wild. Let's choose a planet. Or, to be more precise, let's select one in the vastness of the cosmos and move away from this Earth and start new life. Of course, in daydreams we are allowed to do this just because the imagination is what our species differs from others on Earth. Ok, to begin this little endeavor, we need a little astronomy to start with. What we know for sure is that our galaxy alone contains more than 200 billion stars, the majority of them not so different from our Sun, and by using a basic statistical study based on the planet finder's microlensing technique, there are approximately 100 billion planets orbiting them. Perhaps more. M...

The Prologue of Never-Written Book

Something was bothering her for days. She didn't actually know what it was. It was not the food. She knew that well, and her belly was not itching her. Not a single bit. Mom was giving her delicious portions every day, and she was feeling healthier and stronger every morning. It was not the air or water either. The forest and all three plains outside were... like usual. Beautiful and green, with lots of life emerging from the trees and rocks. Even the ocean was calm and perfect the other day when she foolishly followed her older brother and his two peers to the cliff. They mocked her all the way down the stream and even took all her snacks she had and found on the way. No. What she started to experience just the other day after the trip to the cliffs was some sort of discomfort she never experienced before. Nobody could harm her in the forest. It was not that. Not even on the plains. She was always following her mother and brother during all their travels and never got into any...

Unthinkable Solutions of Fermi's Paradox

"At some point, the gluons will no longer be able to hold the quarks together, and the hadrons will decay. Which will mean the end of matter in this universe." - Albert Einstein  1 As it seems, in our universe, nothing is made to last. Eventually, everything gets old and dies or changes or decays into something else, and I am not referring to the life forms only but all matter in the cosmos. For all we know, this might not be true within our own macroworld alone, but also deep below, the same goes for particles in the quantum realm as well. The fact is that everything in the universe has a tendency to achieve the lowest energy state and to finally rest within a stable system, even if that means going through various changes or decays. In the quantum world, this could be true for the Higgs field as well. According to Hawking, if it becomes meta-stable, the vacuum decay bubble will emerge and consume everything in order to eventually reach the lowest energy state possible. F...

The World of Extraordinary Apps

Smartphones in this touchscreen form have not been among us for a very long time. Even though before the year 2007 the origin of app-based mobile phones existed within a variety of BlackBerry brand models and prototypes in Nokia and NTT DoCoMo labs, only after capacitive touchscreens matured enough to be industrialized and embedded into popular handheld devices started to be really interesting and competitive. Today, after only a decade, the smartphone market is one of the most valuable on the planet, and app stores have reached the limit of 2 million per platform. There are literally zillions of apps out there, and browsing the app libraries became the real effort. Anyhow, today and after a dozen years after the first touchscreen smartphones (LG Prada and iPhone) hit the stores, Viktor and I decided to film/write about a dozen apps that are a little bit unusual and extraordinary compared to those that are used on a daily basis by most of us. To start with, let's first pres...