The curtain is up, the stage is ready and the show must go on! Like every year, Games have a general theme in which costume would be shown to the participants. The general theme would be the guiding line in designing the tasks for each of the arenas, that way bringing together students from different STEM fields in overcoming the modern problems that worry even the most prominent scholars. What tasks our organizers have come up with, we will have a chance to see soon!

This year, STEM Games would be marked by a general theme entitled World Across Scales that we have designed in collaboration with our general sponsor Croatia Osiguranje! World Across Scales wants to emphasize the importance of observing the world around us from different perspectives and scales, in order to come up with new and original solutions in the STEM field. Given the rapid changes in the world, the classical approach to problems is no longer enough. The modern man must look within, around and beyond himself to understand the world in which he lives and to contribute solving global problems in a so far unimaginable way.

World Across Scales

Bigger than the biggest, smaller than the smallest...and everything in between! That is where our world lies, measured by humans - for humans. Looking at the bigger picture, it is not really clear what means a lot or what means a little. Our bodies are made up of billions more atoms than there are grains of sand on Earth. Yet, that number is nowhere close to how many stars there may be in the universe.

The fastest supercomputers crunch terabytes of data at speeds reaching 150 petaflops, requiring enough energy to power a large building. However, our very own brain raises the bar up a scale, exhibiting the speed of 1 exaflop, while requiring just enough energy to power a small light bulb. Race to reach the exascale has begun, and the goal is to simulate precision medicine processes, conversion of plants to biofuels, fundamental forces of the universe and beyond.

Computation yields data, data needs space - actual space. Only one image of a black hole will cost you half a ton of hard drives for 5 petabytes of data! The solution to that problem might have been floating around since the beginning of life on Earth. By resorting to a DNA based storage, we could be saving an image representation of a 40 billion km large region in the universe, into just a few milligrams of biomatter - here on Earth!

It is clear! In order to go far, we need to look very close, including the parts of our world where classical mechanics no longer makes sense. We need to intertwine the scales of our perspective, reveal chains of events triggering occurrences across multiple scales and maybe find Schrödingers cat without opening the box. This year we are going big, we are going small, we are going everywhere - at the same time!