For decades, researchers have studied the cake-cutting problem, which explores how to fairly divide resources, Stephen Ornes reported in “A fair slice?” (SN: 9/9/23, p. 14).
Reader Robert Lavelle tried this method to split a sandwich among 13 students. It worked smoothly until one student wanted a smaller piece than her fair share. Those who left the game before her got pieces equal to each other, as did those who left after. But the first group ended up with smaller pieces.
As the story covers, this method is not envy-free: Those who exit early may covet pieces cut later. But there is a solution, says Steven Brams, a game theorist and political scientist at New York University. “Let all the players not make full cuts but notches where they would make cuts. If a person indicates she wants only a smaller piece, cut this piece off for her. Then run the procedure again, without her piece, for the other players,” he says.
“Extravagance of early galaxies” stated that about 372,000 years after the Big Bang, during the “cosmic dark ages,” hydrogen formed and filled the cosmos with an opaque gas (SN: 8/12/23, p. 18). It would have been clearer to write that hydrogen made the cosmos transparent to certain wavelengths of light while opaque to others. Eventually, after the first stars and galaxies formed, hydrogen atoms lost their electrons, lifting the veil that blocked certain wavelengths.
2023-10-29 06:00:00
Article from www.sciencenews.org