Science can do a lot, but not everything. New Scientist magazine has compiled a selection of facts, at the mention of which experts throw up their hands and shake their heads
1. DESERT AND CURE
Many people have heard of the placebo effect. This is when a person is given the necessary medicine for several days in a row and he feels how his health improves. However, if, instead of a remedy, you give him some absolutely harmless neutral solution, he will still convince everyone that he continues to recover.
The most famous researcher of this problem, Professor Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin (Italy), conducted this cynical experiment with patients who needed a strong pain reliever every day. And when he slipped them instead of morphine pain relievers, the pain still receded. This is not an isolated experiment - doctors around the world know about such cases. The main hypothesis of the explanation is that the brain can somehow influence the state of the body. But how is unknown. By the way, this effect has been noticed in mice and monkeys, so the placebo is not an invention of suspicious people.
“We now need to understand whether this effect works only for certain types of diseases or for all ailments a common mechanism works,” says Professor Benedetti. “And if successful, unprecedented prospects will open up for medicine.
2. WHERE DARK MATTER COMES FROM A
little lesson in astronomy: all galaxies in our Universe revolve around one center at high speed. But when scientists calculated the total masses of the galaxies, it turned out that they are too light. And according to the laws of physics, this whole carousel would have broken long ago. However, it does not break. To explain what is happening, scientists have come up with a hypothesis that there is some dark matter in the universe that cannot be seen. But what it is and how to touch it, astronomers have not yet imagined. It is only known that its mass is 90 percent of the mass of the Universe. This means that we know what kind of world surrounds us by only one tenth.
3. WHY DECIDED THERE IS NO LIFE ON MARS
The search for organic matter on the Red Planet began in 1976 - the American Viking spacecraft landed there. He had to conduct three experiments, which should have clearly confirmed or refuted the statement about its habitability. But all three gave mixed results. As a result, experts decided that there was still no life there. And the strange results of the experiments were attributed to the chemical composition of the soil. However, the author of the experiments, Gabriel Levin, did not agree with them. And, based on the results of the research "Vikings", he developed a whole theory about how the Martian protozoa differ at the molecular level from the terrestrial ones. Is he right? Not yet known.
4. WHO BRAKES THE "PIONEERS"
The American probes Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 were launched in 1972 and 1983, respectively. By now, they should have already flown out of the solar system. However, both one and the other, for some unknown reason, began to change their trajectory, as if an unknown force would not let them out of the system. Pioneer 10 has already deviated four hundred thousand kilometers from the calculated trajectory. "Pioneer-11" exactly repeats the path of its brother. There are many versions: the influence of the solar wind, fuel leakage, programming errors. But they are all not very convincing, since both ships, launched at an interval of 11 years, behave the same.
If you do not take into account the intrigues of aliens or a divine plan not to let people out of the solar system, then perhaps the influence of the mysterious dark matter, which was mentioned above, is just manifested here. Or maybe there are some gravitational effects unknown to us? Now experts are developing a special probe that will repeat the path of the "Pioneers" and try to solve the riddle.
5. DOES THE 10TH PLANET OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM EXIST
Far, far beyond the dwarf planet Pluto, there is a mysterious asteroid Sedna, one of the largest in our system. In addition, Sedna is considered the reddest object in our system - it is even redder than Mars. Why is unknown. But the main mystery lies elsewhere. It makes a full circle around the Sun in 10 thousand years. Moreover, it turns in a very elongated orbit. Either this asteroid flew to us from another star system. And maybe, some astronomers think so, from a circular orbit he was knocked down by the gravitational attraction of some large object. Which one? For example, the mysterious planet Nibiru - a planet that supposedly exists on the very border of the solar system, but astronomers have not yet been able to detect it.
There is one more fact in favor of the existence of a mysterious planet. Sedna is located in the Kuiper belt - a region of space extremely saturated with small cosmic bodies. Starting from Pluto, the Kuiper belt density increases and then drops sharply to zero. This could be so if all objects that are located further away were attracted by the gravitational field of the mysterious planet. However, while astronomers cannot detect it.
Perhaps the mystery will be solved when NASA's New Horizonts probe gets to Pluto in 2015 and from there tries to examine the elusive Nibiru.
6. STRANGE SIGNAL FROM SPACE
In the 1970s, a program began in the United States to search for radio signals from brothers in mind. What if they want to contact us? For this, the radio telescope was directed to different parts of the sky, and it scanned the ether at different frequencies, trying to detect a signal of artificial origin. For several years astronomers could not boast of at least some results. But on August 15, 1977, while astronomer Jerry Echman was on duty, the recorder recording everything that fell into the "ears" of the radio telescope, displayed on the tape a curve reminiscent of the word "WOW". The signal lasted 37 seconds. And it was running at a frequency of 1420 megahertz. According to international agreements, no terrestrial transmitter operates in this range. It proceeded from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, where the nearest star is located 220 light years from Earth. Was it artificial? There is still no answer. Subsequently, scientists have repeatedly searched this area of the sky. But to no avail.