Mathematician cracks 150-year-old chess problem

Mathematician cracks 150-year-old chess problem | One nasal droplet's worth of coronavirus is enough to make you sick | Construction may have damaged 112 million-year-old dinosaur tracks in Utah Created for {EMAIL} | [Web Version]( February 3, 2022 CONNECT WITH LIVESCIENCE  [Facebook]( [Twitter](  [LIVESCIENCE]( [LIVESCIENCE]( Amazing science every day [SIGN UP]( ⋅ [WEBSITE](  [] Top Science News [] [Mathematician cracks 150-year-old chess problem]( [Mathematician cracks 150-year-old chess problem]( (Tomasz Bobrzynski via Getty Images) A chess problem that has stumped mathematicians for more than 150 years has finally been cracked. The n-queens problem began as a much simpler puzzle, and was first posed in an 1848 issue of the German chess newspaper Schachzeitung by the chess composer Max Bezzel. It asked how many ways eight rival queens — which are the most powerful pieces on the chessboard and capable of moving any number of squares horizontally, vertically and diagonally — could be positioned on a standard 64-square board without any queen attacking another. Full Story: [Live Science]( (2/3) [LinkedIn]( [Twitter]( [Facebook]( [Email]( [] COVID-19 [] [One nasal droplet's worth of coronavirus is enough to make you sick]( [One nasal droplet's worth of coronavirus is enough to make you sick]( (sturti via Getty Images) Scientists deliberately infected young, healthy volunteers with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 — and now, they've shared their first results from that experiment. The new study, published Tuesday (Feb. 1) in Springer Nature’s preprint database, In Review, has not yet been peer reviewed, but it could provide insight into how mild COVID-19 unfolds, from the moment of exposure to the point that the virus is eliminated from the body. Full Story: [Live Science]( (2/2) [LinkedIn]( [Twitter]( [Facebook]( [Email]( [] History & Archaeology [] [Construction may have damaged 112 million-year-old dinosaur tracks in Utah]( [Construction may have damaged 112 million-year-old dinosaur tracks in Utah]( (Gary Whitton / Alamy) A government-funded backhoe removing a wooden boardwalk has badly damaged a unique dinosaur trackway in Utah, witnesses say. The boardwalk was built to protect the ancient footprints, according to the Bureau of Land Management, which denies that its backhoe messed up the tracks. Visitors to the site last week reported the damage to the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracksite, about 20 miles (30 kilometers) north of Moab, saying the marks made by the heavy vehicle's treads clearly lay on top of many of the dinosaur tracks, some of which are at least 112 million years old. Full Story: [Live Science]( (2/2) [LinkedIn]( [Twitter]( [Facebook]( [Email]( [] [This may be one of the oldest Buddhist temples ever discovered]( [This may be one of the oldest Buddhist temples ever discovered]( (ISMEO/Ca' Foscari University of Venice) An ancient temple dating from the early centuries of Buddhism has been unearthed in the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan — part of the ancient Gandhara region that was conquered by Alexander the Great and gave rise to a mixing of Buddhist belief and Greek art. Archaeologists think that the temple dates from about the middle of the second century B.C., at a time when Gandhara was ruled by the Indo-Greek kingdom of northern India, and that it was built above an earlier Buddhist temple that may have dated from as early as the third century B.C. That means people would have built the older temple within a few hundred years of the death of the founder of Buddhism, Siddhārtha Gautama, who lived in what is now northern India and Nepal between about 563 B.C. and 483 B.C. Full Story: [Live Science]( (2/2) [LinkedIn]( [Twitter]( [Facebook]( [Email]( Featured Content Sponsored Content from Gigabyte [Unleash your gaming potential with Gigabyte Aero laptops]( When it comes to editing and rendering, performance is all that matters to content creators. Inspired by the "performance-above- all" mentality, Gigabyte delivers to the market a solution that satisfies the most fastidious content creators, the Aero laptop series. [Read More]( [] Climate Change [] [Greenland lost enough ice in last 2 decades to cover entire US in 1.5 feet of water]( [Greenland lost enough ice in last 2 decades to cover entire US in 1.5 feet of water]( (NASA Goddard) The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, and the toll on Greenland's massive ice sheet is becoming achingly clear. According to new satellite data compiled by Polar Portal, a collection of four Danish government research institutions, Greenland has lost more than 5,100 billion tons (4,700 billion metric tons) of ice in the past 20 years — or roughly enough to flood the entire United States in 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) of water. This extensive ice loss has contributed to half an inch (1.2 centimeters) of global sea-level rise in just two decades, the researchers wrote on their website. 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