APC Science Union · Online Library

Spatiotemporal Trajectories in Memory Author: Myelin Reviewed by: 食野   Episodic memory is a form of long-term memory, defined as memory for events that occurred at a particular time and place. It is inseparable from personal experience, and its defining feature is its narrative, event-based character—for example, remembering an activity you attended or a place you once visited. [1]   In daily life, we usually imagine space and time as separate dimensions of experience, yet we often combine them when describing episodic memories. If I ask what you did this morning, you may mentally retrace the events of the entire morning as they unfolded across times and places. This reflects a widely held view: episodic memory embeds our records of events in a unified representation ...

Author: Taosheng   A friendly warning: this article may need to be read carefully, section by section, several times. Please prepare yourself. Section 1: Introduction; Section 2: Propositions; Section 3: The Four Types of Categorical Propositions; Section 4: Syllogisms; Section 5: Conclusion.   Feel free to skip to the section that matches your level. Section 1: Introduction   As we happily surf the internet, we encounter all kinds of views: some incisive, some warm and resolute, and some elaborate comic bits. We tend to accept certain views and reject others. Doing so can deepen our understanding of an issue and help us form views of our own, while also giving us emotional support.   Seen from this perspective, the very existence of a view has value, no matter how unreasona ...

Author: Shiguang Glass artwork The Development of Glass 1.1 The Origins of Glass around the World   Historical records indicate that by roughly 3000–2000 BCE, the Egyptians or Mesopotamians already possessed relatively mature glassmaking techniques. A legend also relates that more than three thousand years ago, Phoenician merchants discovered that when exposed to fire, a mineral called natron, or “natural soda” (or, in another account, saltpeter), reacted chemically with the quartz sand on a beach to form crystals—the earliest glass. The Phoenicians recognized the commercial opportunity. They exploited the reaction to produce large quantities of crude glass beads by firing and fusing sand, stone, and soda, then sold them widely. They made substantial profits and set off the world’s fi ...

Author: 丛雨 Reviewer: 円岛   Sirius is the brightest star in Earth’s night sky and is visible every winter. In 1844, the German astronomer and mathematician Friedrich Bessel calculated that Sirius must actually be a binary system with a companion about as massive as the Sun. The companion was so faint that it remained unseen for years. It was finally photographed in 1862, shining at only one-thousandth the brightness of Sirius. Its spectrum was obtained later, and astronomers began to recognize a new class of object: the white dwarf. Sirius and its companion at X-ray wavelengths The Late Evolution of Sun-like Stars   To understand how white dwarfs form, we must begin with the post-main-sequence evolution of low- and intermediate-mass stars. Stars below 2.3 solar masses are generally class ...

Author: delta Reviewed by: Guanfu · Juntian   No. That concludes this explainer.   But if you learned about Cavendish’s torsion-balance experiment in middle school, you are probably not willing to stop there. Physics has a technique known as two-stage amplification, so could the same or a similar idea be used to measure dimensions in the microscopic world?   It certainly can. This article explains, in accessible language, one method for measuring the cross-sectional area of a molecule: the surface-tension method. What is surface tension?   Really, do we have to start all the way back here?   You have seen surface tension countless times: raindrops on a window, dew on leaves in the early morning, and large soap bubbles in the laundry. You may also have encountered, or will encounter, the ...

Author: Shenhong Preface:   Hello, everyone—I’m Shenhong. It is a pleasure to meet you. This is the second entry in my personal Unity journal (the first contains some private material, so I will not publish it). It is also the first submission from me and the other members of our current team since we joined the Union. We look forward to getting to know you.   This series is not a development log. It is my record of learning Unity and of moments that matter during game development. Because it is closer to a diary, I will not go deeply into technical material, nor will entries follow a fixed schedule. I hope to share the joys and frustrations of one person—and a group of people—who chose to develop games because they love playing them. There may also be introductions to the development p ...

Author: Shenzhou Reviewer: Weiming   Transposons, also known as jumping genes, were first described in 1947 by the renowned American geneticist Barbara McClintock while she was studying the unstable inheritance of variegation in the maize aleurone layer. They revealed a new mechanism by which an intact genetic unit can move from one location to another within a genome. The phenomenon was analyzed further in a 2002 paper by Fu H. and Dooner H. K., which showed that, at the molecular level, every organism is a product of genetic recombination: new sequences continually arise through mutation, while existing sequences evolve through exchange, insertion, and rearrangement.   A genetic unit capable of this movement is called a “transposable element,” or transposon. Transposition differs marke ...

Author: Shiguang Reviewer: Guanfu · Juntian I. Introduction   This time, the assessment task from my school’s studio—yes, another assessment—was to recreate a game. We were given three choices: Don’t Starve, Slay the Spire, or Soul Knight. I had never played any of them, so after some thought, I decided to make a rough version of Arknights. I had previously seen an expert on Bilibili develop the Arknights battle interface in only 48 hours. It did not look that difficult… so I gave it a try!   Only after starting did I discover how challenging the task really was. Here are two screenshots of the game interface. To see the full game in action, watch the video posted on Bilibili through the Alliance’s official account. Game interface II. Design Approach Scenes   My original plan includ ...

Author: Zikongli Reviewer: Guanfu · Juntian   The previous installment, “Financial Crises (IV): Britain’s South Sea Bubble,” explained how the South Sea Company acquired a monopoly on trade with the South Seas—that is, South America—by taking on government debt. Numerous publications of the day advertised South America’s abundant produce and deposits of precious metals. Spain had already developed many silver and gold mines there, so the public had little reason to doubt these claims. Buoyed by rosy expectations for the company’s future, its shares held a remarkably steady market value.   In reality, however, the precious-metal deposits described in those pamphlets lay chiefly within Spanish colonies, and Spain was hardly going to hand that wealth to the British for free. For many years ...

Author: Abaitel   The mature human brain has many remarkable capacities: higher cognition, learning, creativity, imagination, and an appreciation of beauty. It may be hard to imagine that a brain capable of all this develops from a single fertilized egg. Drawing on what I learned about the brain over a semester, both in and outside class, this article offers a broad view of human brain development. Early embryonic development and the fetal brain   In a long and closely contested race, one competitor pulls ahead of a crowd of tail-propelled rivals. It reaches the destination by the narrowest margin: a warm, spherical cell. This cell is the ovum, the target pursued by the sperm. Each sperm carries different genetic information. Only the first to enter can combine its information with that ...