https://science.mkhz.kr/en/ From where a question was first asked to the moment its answer was overturned — the history of science, followed on a map. en Tue, 29 Sep 2026 22:59:46 +0000 MK ATLAS https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-periodic-fold https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-periodic-fold Each floor of the atom's apartment block holds 2, 8, 18, 32 electrons. Rooms come in squares, 1, 4, 9, 16, and each larger square adds 1, 3, 5, 7. Two to a room, one of each spin. And the table's rows come in pairs, 8, 8, 18, 18, because the front door upstairs fills before the back rooms downstairs. Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-electron-where https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-electron-where If an atom is a football pitch and its nucleus a grain of rice, the rest of the pitch is not empty but filled with an electron cloud. An electron is not a small ball but a ripple in a field that fills the universe, and before it is measured it has no single place. Chemistry happens in that empty space. Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-atom-memory https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-atom-memory Every breath I take holds 600 to 700 million molecules from the breaths Admiral Yi Sun-sin exhaled. Their carbon becomes trees, fruit, my DNA. Yet an atom has nowhere to record whose it was. Memory lives not in atoms but in how they are arranged. Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-mv1-trace https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-mv1-trace Photos, a voice, writing, the me in someone's memory. Science calls all of it information. Information is how much it lets you know that you did not know before, so it can be measured, like a game of twenty questions, by how many yes-or-no questions it takes. But what we leave this way does not last. Photos fade, and memories blur. Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-mv2-carbon https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-mv2-carbon Carbon has six protons and six electrons and shares its four top-floor electrons with neighbours. Four hands let it build chains, rings and branches, which is why life on Earth is woven from carbon. The glue between atoms is electrons, not neutrons. Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-mv3-breath https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-mv3-breath Exhaled breath does not fly into space; in a year or two it mixes through the whole planet. Trees breathe in its carbon and build their bodies from it. Dry a tree and most of its weight came from air, not soil. Grass soon gives the carbon back; a tree holds it for centuries. Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-mv4-memory https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-mv4-memory Atoms of one kind are identical, with nowhere to record whose breath they were, and quantum strangeness unravels in a warm body faster than a blink. Yet feelings really do cross between people, riding not on atoms but on faces and voices. Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-mv5-field https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-mv5-field Every point in the universe has a value of the electromagnetic field, and even the emptiest vacuum trembles with it. Between galaxies, every sugar-cube of space still holds about four hundred particles of light left from the Big Bang. Light is a ripple in that field. Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-mv6-time https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-mv6-time Play a film of billiard balls backwards and nothing looks wrong: the laws of physics do not care which way time runs. A burnt book does not reassemble because scattered arrangements vastly outnumber assembled ones. Three walls that block rewinding, and the physicists who imagined universes running the other way. Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-mv7-life https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-mv7-life The atoms of life are the same as in rock and air. Yet a blueprint really exists: DNA. Not one special atom but billions of ordinary atoms in order, carried on not because it never disappears but because it keeps being copied. To close the series, the film's lines are sorted one by one into science and imagination. Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-m4-superconductor https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-m4-superconductor In the summer of 2023 a Korean paper claimed a superconductor that works at room temperature. Shares jumped, laboratories worldwide rushed to check, and a few weeks later the answer was no. But the fuss revealed something: fusion, quantum computers and hospital MRI all live at the same temperature, and making that temperature is the bottleneck all three share. Mon, 14 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-m5-abundance https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-m5-abundance Asked what they would do with unlimited energy, people answer: make gold, create matter, restore the ruined natural world. One of the three is real, one is possible but pointless, and one is not something energy does directly. And the promise of free electricity was made once before, in 1954 — and turned out to be wrong. Mon, 14 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k1-fusion https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k1-fusion In Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, there is a large doughnut-shaped machine. Inside it, gas at a hundred million degrees floats on magnets. It is an attempt to copy, on the ground, what the Sun does. Why so hot, why there is still no power station, and what the people who do this work actually studied. Sun, 13 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k24-fusionpower https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k24-fusionpower We keep hearing that a hundred million degrees was held for so many seconds. Nobody says what turns that heat into electricity. The answer is a little deflating: it boils water. And hidden in that deflating answer is the most awkward question in the field — does more electricity come out than went in? Sun, 13 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-m1-quantum https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-m1-quantum Every cipher broken, new drugs pouring out, problems no supercomputer can touch finally cracked. If you have sat through five explanations of quantum computing and still do not get it, the fault is not the explanation but a premise that was wrong all along. A quantum computer is not a machine that solves anything faster. It is fast only at problems where the wrong answers can be made to cancel each other out. Put that one line first and the rest falls into place. Sun, 13 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-m2-aipower https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-m2-aipower One data centre, they say, uses as much electricity as a city; in a few years, as much as a whole country. That is broadly true. But once you see why it eats so much, the answer splits three ways: make more, make it eat less, or use less. All three are being built in Daejeon. Sun, 13 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-m3-brain https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-m3-brain The human brain runs on twenty watts, the cost of one light bulb. So, people say, copy the brain and AI's electricity drops a hundredfold. The direction is right. But take apart why the brain is so cheap and what needs copying is not the brain but three of its habits — and those habits have a price. The brain cannot multiply. Sun, 13 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k19-polar https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k19-polar How can we know the temperature of a time with no thermometers and no people? The ice wrote it down. Drill deep into Antarctica and air from eight hundred thousand years ago comes up in bubbles. Korea's polar institute in Incheon goes to the end of the Earth to fetch it. Thu, 10 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k20-synchrotron https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k20-synchrotron Send electrons round fast enough and light leaks out. At first it was a nuisance, energy going to waste. Then it turned out the leaking light was brighter than the sun and its wavelength could be chosen, and everything changed. Pohang has two machines that make it. Thu, 10 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k21-forensic https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k21-forensic The culprit believes nothing was left behind. Yet every touch stamps sweat, every brush sheds a fibre, and a drop of saliva is an identity card. In Wonju, the National Forensic Service reads those traces. Thu, 10 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k22-ship https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k22-ship A steel nail sinks, yet a steel ship floats. And under the bow of every large ship there is a strange bulb. Both make sense once you know what water does. Institutes in Daejeon and Busan study that water. Thu, 10 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k23-weather https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k23-weather It rains on the day you left the umbrella at home. Not because the forecast is careless: weather has a wall no computer can climb, and the man who found the wall was himself computing weather. Thu, 10 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k2-accelerator https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k2-accelerator Under the Sindong district north of Daejeon sits a building the size of eleven football pitches, 550 metres at its longest. Inside, atomic nuclei are thrown at nearly the speed of light into other nuclei. What is anyone hoping to see? And why must this machine be chilled to 269 degrees below zero? Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k3-cdma https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k3-cdma Twenty people take calls in one subway carriage and none of the voices mix. Why not? The method first put into commercial service in Daedeok does not divide the room at all — it lets everyone speak at once and gives each of them a different way of speaking. It is also a story about the difference between inventing something and being the first to make it work. Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k4-orbit https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k4-orbit Say rocket and you picture flame and a climb into the sky. But reaching space and staying in space are very different things. Going a hundred kilometres up and falling back is not hard. Not falling means running sideways. This is where a rocket's size — and the fact that most of it is fuel tank — comes from. Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k5-nuriho https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k5-nuriho The previous article said a rocket buys speed, not height. What does the machine that makes that speed look like? Why it must carry its own oxygen, why four engines are strapped together, why it flies south from Goheung — and what made it different from the rocket before it. Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k6-standard https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k6-standard You measure with a ruler. But what was that ruler measured against? And the ruler that made it? Follow the question all the way up and you arrive at a single reference somewhere in the world. What if that reference drifts? In Daejeon there are people whose work is to see that it does not. Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k7-reactor https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k7-reactor The fusion article said heavy nuclei give out energy when split. A reactor is the machine that does the splitting. But this machine comes with something others do not have: the people who build it and the people who watch it are deliberately kept apart. All three sit in Daejeon. Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k8-newdrug https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k8-newdrug One tablet swallowed for a headache. Who found what is inside it, and how? And why does it take so long? Daejeon holds three separate places: one that makes candidate compounds, one that establishes what is in herbal materials, and one that tests whether any of it does harm. That they are separate says what this work is. Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900 https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k9-biodrug https://science.mkhz.kr/en/library/c-k9-biodrug The previous article called a medicine a key that fits a lock. But some keys are too large and too intricate to be built by hand. So what then? You get something that already knows how. That is the work of the biotechnology institute in Daejeon. Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0900