SUCCESS! Science chose these Hungarian papers to be the world’s best this year

Photo: BME/ Domokos Gábor

Science chose two Hungarian research topics to be among the world’s best this year. One of them says that the world is made of cubes. Meanwhile, the other is about the heat detection ability of dogs’ noses.

According to qubit.hu, Science chooses the world’s best research papers each December. This year, they made two lists: one consists exclusively of COVID-19 breakthroughs, while the other is made up of the rest. In 2020, one of the best papers was about the heat detection abilities of dogs’ nose tips, conducted by the Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) and the University of Lund (Sweden). Mathematician Gábor Domokos from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics wrote the other one about a philosophical theory saying that

the world falls apart into cubes.

The latter says that everything (ice blocks, rocks, etc.) falls apart into shapes resembling cubes. Mr Domokos published the relevant paper in the PNAS, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He says that the rule is universal, from the microscopic world of a cell to the planets. Sujit Datta, the chemical engineer from Princeton University, said that the work of Domokos and his colleagues from Debrecen, the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and the University of Pennsylvania was an astonishing combination of geology, material science, and pure mathematics.

That is why Science chose it to be one of the four topics they present in their end-of-the-year podcast. During the talk, they called Domokos’s work the most poetic and philosophical scientific paper of 2020.

Mr Domokos explained to qubit.hu regarding his research that if we take fragments of any materials (ice, rock, etc.) on Earth, Mars, or an asteroid,