Plus Blog

Celebrating National Biology Week
October 12, 2012

The first ever National Biology Week is happening between October 13th and 19th 2012. It's organised by the Society of Biology and there'll be events around the country giving everyone the chance to learn about the second-most fascinating science (if you count maths as a science). But if you'd rather stay in and cuddle up with your laptop you can read about the many overlaps between maths and biology here on Plus. They not only drive biology but also pose new challenges for maths. Here are some of our favourite maths and biology articles (and there's more in our project Do you know what's good for you: Mathematics and the biomedical sciences).

Biology's next microscope, mathematics' next physics — It is thought that the next great advances in biology and medicine will be discovered with mathematics. As biology stands on the brink of becoming a theoretical science this article asks if there is more to this collaboration than maths acting as biology's newest microscope.


How the leopard got its spots — How does the uniform ball of cells that make up an embryo differentiate to create the dramatic patterns of a zebra or leopard? How come there are spotty animals with stripy tails, but no stripy animals with spotty tails? This article solves these, and other, puzzles of animal patterning.


Reconstructing the tree of life — At the heart of Darwin's theory of evolution lies a beautifully simple mathematical object: the evolutionary tree. In this article we look at how maths is used to reconstruct and understand it.


Finding your way home without knowing where you are — When insects go foraging, they zoom off from their nest in complex zig-zag paths. How do they manage to find their way back home? And how do they manage to do so along a straight path?


If you're a teacher looking for hands-on activities on maths and biology, try the Maths and our Health and Disease Dynamics schools packs from our sister site Motivate and the stemNRICH Living World collection from our sister site NRICH.
Relatively prime is on the air!
September 21, 2012
bungee jumping

Good news! The first episode of a new maths podcast, Relatively Prime, came out this week and it's a good 'un. Host Samuel Hansen has taken the plunge by interviewing our favourite statistician, David Spiegelhalter, and a host of others to explore some fascinating mathematical tools: game theory, risk and relief geometry.

There'll be a new episode every monday for the next seven weeks, so stay tuned to the website, or subscribe using RSS or iTunes.

"What if I said there was something funky with the Universe?"
September 10, 2012

Combat the Monday blues with Michael Wilson's brilliant new Dark Matter Rap:


So while we wait on new results in the hunt for dark matter, you can recap on what we know so far in our interview with Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal: What is dark matter?

And if you want more of Wilson, you can see more of work on his YouTube channel, The Coma Niddy Show, including the particularly entertaining String Theory Song!
The Plus Paralympic calendar: Friday 7th September
September 7, 2012
Wheelchair rugby

Wheelchair rugby. Image from Wikipedia.

Wheelchair rugby is gearing up to the medal events on Sunday. If you placed a player of this impressive game next to a physics professor you probably wouldn't have much trouble spotting who's who. Yet, there's an intriguing connection between rugby and one of the more puzzling areas of physics. Find out more in Rugby and relativity.
The Plus Paralympic calendar: Thursday 6th September
September 6, 2012
Riverbank Arena

London's Riverbank Arena is hosting Paralympic football. Image: London 2012.

London's Riverbank Arena will see action today with semi-finals kicking off in Paralympic football. Generally, football fans can be a rowdy a lot and that's something you've got to think about when building a football venue. Imagine the 80,000 people that fit into a stadium like Wembley jumping up and down in unison to We will rock you. Any structure, no matter how solid, has its own natural frequency at which it likes to vibrate, and if that happens to be in tune with the people's, you can end up with a dangerous sway and ultimate disaster. And that's just one of the things you need to take into account when building a stadium. Find out more in our interview with the engineer Paul Shepherd, who's been involved in building the Arsenal football stadium, in our podcast Stadium maths (the interview with Shepherd starts at 8 minutes 10 seconds).
The Plus Paralympic calendar: Wednesday 5th September
September 5, 2012
Jamie Clarke

Jamie Clarke at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino.

One thing that's characterised the London 2012 Games is its great atmosphere — and that's largely down to the tens of thousands of volunteers who've donated their time, effort and enthusiasm to the Games. For most of them this will probably be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But it's also possible to be part of big sporting events like this one and earn money at the same time. Jamie Clarke is one of the lucky people who has managed to do this and it's maths that has led him there. To find out how to live the sporting dream as a mathlete rather than an athlete, read our career interview with Jamie.
Syndicate content