<s>[INST] Prove that $x^8+x^7+x^6-5x^5-5x^4-5x^3+7x^2+7x+6=0$ has no solutions over $\mathbb{R}$ The problem goes as follows:

Using elementary methods prove that $x^8+x^7+x^6-5x^5-5x^4-5x^3+7x^2+7x+6=0$ has no solutions for $x \in \mathbb{R}$.

I first came across the problem in a school book targeted towards students just exposed to factorisation and it intrigued me how one could prove this without Sturm's Theorem. Maybe one could try to factorise into squares, but I can get no result from that. Thanks in advance.
 [/INST] We may observe that our polynomial has the form
$$ (x^2+x+1)\left(x^3 - \frac{5}{2}\right)^2 + \frac{1}{4} (3x^2+3x-1) $$
The first term is always non-negative (and positive for $x \neq \sqrt[3]{\frac{5}{2}}$, that case we can check separately), and the second one is non-negative outside interval $(-2,1)$, so we just need to check the values inside this interval. But $x^2+x+1 = (x+ \frac{1}{2})^2) + \frac{3}{4} \geqslant \frac{3}{4}$, and $(x^3-\frac{5}{2})^2$ has on this interval values not less than $\frac{9}{4}$. It suffices to show that minimum of $\frac{1}{4}(3x^2+3x-1)$ is greater than $\frac{27}{4}$, which is easy to check with elementary methods.
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