News from the world of Maths
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February 18, 2012
Plants are amazingly good at something that is still flummoxing
us humans in our quest for sustainable energy sources: turning sunlight
into energy in an efficient way. Around 100 bilions tons of biomass
are produced annually through photosynthesis. The question is, how
exacty do plants do it?
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February 8, 2012
Yesterday's refusal by the UK government to posthumously pardon Alan Turing makes sad news for maths, computer science and the fight against discrimination. But even if symbolic gestures are, symbolically, being rebuffed, at least Turing's most important legacy — the scientific one — is going stronger than ever. An example is this week's announcement that scientists have devised a biological computer, based on an idea first described by Turing in the 1930s. |
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January 10, 2012
In the corner of the garden between the Centre of Mathematical Sciences and the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, sits a reminder of our ongoing quest to understand gravity: an apple tree that was taken as a cutting from the tree at Newton's birthplace, the tree that is said to have inspired his theory of gravity. Newton's theory was extended to the cosmological scales by Einstein's theory of general relativity – but can supergravity explain how gravity works in the quantum world? |
January 9, 2012
"Astronomers are used to large numbers, but few are as large as the odds I'd have given this celebration today," is how Astronomer Royal Martin Rees started his presentation at Stephen Hawking's birthday symposium yesterday. He was talking about the 1960s when he first met Hawking who was then already suffering motor neurone disease. But Rees' prediction has been proved wrong. Hawking turned 70 |
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January 4, 2012
Human reasoning is biased and illogical. At least that's what a huge body of psychological research seems to show. But now a psychological scientist from the University of Toulouse in France has come up with a new theory: that logical and probabilistic thinking is an intuitive part of decision making, only its conclusions often lose out to heuristic considerations. |
December 13, 2011
"It's a great day for particle physics," says Ben Allanach, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge. "It's very exciting, I think we're on the verge of the Higgs discovery." And indeed, it seems like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has given particle physics an early Christmas present — compelling evidence that the famous Higgs boson exists. |
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December 12, 2011
Researchers in Germany have created a rare example
of a weird phenomenon predicted by quantum mechanics:
quantum entanglement, or as Einstein called it, "spooky action at a
distance". The idea, loosely speaking, is that particles which have
once interacted physically remain linked to each other even when they're
moved apart and seem to affect each other instantaneously.
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November 8, 2011
This Friday, 11/11/11, will see the launch of numberphile, a brand new YouTube channel dedicated
entirely to numbers. And it's a very special channel too: rather than relying on users to produce and share their videos, YouTube is for the first time paying people to produce original content.
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