Math
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Animals
Seen Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster? Data suggest the odds are low
Floe Foxon is a data scientist by day. But in his free time, he applies his skills to astronomy, cryptology and sightings of mythical creatures.
- Health & Medicine
A catalog of all human cells reveals a mathematical pattern
Smaller cells occur in larger numbers in the human body, and cells of different size classes contribute equally to our overall mass.
- Math
Here’s why mathematicians are so interested in cake cutting
The question of how to fairly divide resources attracts game theorists, computer scientists, economists, legal experts and more.
- Math
How geometry solves architectural problems for bees and wasps
Adding five - and seven - sided cells in pairs during nest building helps the colonyfit together differently sized hexa gonal cells , a new study shows.
- Life
A 407-million-year-old plant’s leaves skipped the usual Fibonacci spirals
Most land plants living today have spiral patterns involving the famous Fibonacci sequence of numbers. But an extinct, ancient plant did not.
- Quantum Physics
Quantum computers could break the internet. Here’s how to save it
Today's encryption schemes will be vulnerable to future quantum computers, but new algorithms and a quantum internet could help.
- Math
Here’s how we could begin decoding an alien message using math
A new mathematical approach looks for order in strings of bits – without relying on human assumptions.
- Math
A ‘vampire einstein’ tile outdoes mathematicians’ latest feat
A newfound shape covers an infinite plane with a pattern that doesn’t repeat and without mirror images of the shape.
- Math
‘Once Upon a Prime’ finds the hidden math in literature
In her new book, mathematician Sarah Hart explains how math shapes all sorts of literary works, from nursery rhymes to Moby-Dick.
- Math
How Pythagoras turned math into a tool for understanding reality
Reality was made of numbers, Pythagoras said, and he employed numbers to explain the “harmony of the heavens.”
- Physics
These worms can escape tangled blobs in an instant. Here’s how
Tangled masses of California blackworms form over minutes but untangle in tens of milliseconds. Now scientists know how.
- Math
Dense crowds of pedestrians shift into surprisingly orderly lines. Math explains why
New research into collective behavior adds to decades of study on the wisdom of crowds.
