COSMOS, the world's first national cosmology supercomputer, has been launched.

How do you choose a partner? Is it an irrational choice or is it made rationally, based on a mathematical model which analyses the best potential partner you are likely to meet?

The previous feature, "Mathematics, marriage and finding somewhere to eat" investigated the problem of finding the best potential partner from a fixed number of potential partners using a technique known as "optimal stopping". Inevitably, mathematicians and mathematical psychologists have constructed other models of the problem...

An account of how a prisoner of war's diary was recently decoded. Donald Hill wrote his diary in a numerical code, disguised as a set of mathematical tables, while in Hong Kong during and after the Japanese invasion of 1941.

Space probes, like NASA's recent Pathfinder mission to Mars, have radio transmitters of only a few watts, but have to transmit pictures and scientific data across hundreds of millions of miles without the information being completely swamped by noise. Read about how coding theory helps.

• The Dearing report
• Network capacity problem
• References

Sir Walter Raleigh is perhaps best known for laying down his cloak in the mud for Queen Elizabeth I. But, he also started a mathematical quest which to this day remains unsolved.

The UK weekly science magazine New Scientist has unveiled a brand new web site.

Many of our readers have asked for more information about the hailstrone sequence problem from the last issue.

This year, for the first time, the Met. Office is publishing an experimental long range forecast for the average Central England Temperature. 

Chess world champion Gary Kasparov has been defeated by Deep Blue, the world's highest ranking chess computer.