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Ben at the micro frontier

Ben Allanach is a theoretical physicist who has worked at CERN and is interested in something called supersymmetry, which predicts particles that could be dark matter and might be produced in the collisions at CERN. Watch Ben explain it all in this TEDx lecture.
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Someone about to flip a coin

Why you shouldn't use a toss for overtime

In soccer a coin toss is used to decide who goes first in a penalty shootout and similarly in American football a coin decides who plays offence in overtime. But is this really fair? This article explores an alternative.

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Ripping apart Einstein

Cutting the threads of the spacetime fabric and reinstating the aether could lead to a theory of quantum gravity.
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Melting spacetime

To understand how spacetime might have emerged in the early cosmos we need to heat up the equations, and thaw the space and time dimensions.
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What is space?

Space is the stage on which physics happens. It's unaffected by what happens in it and it would still be there if everything in it disappeared. This is how we learn to think about space at school. But the idea is as novel as it is out-dated.
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What Planck saw

Cosmologists gathered in the Netherlands last week to discuss a new view of the Universe. The Universe as seen by Planck was an international conference to discuss the recently released scientific results from the Planck satellite, including two particularly striking snapshots of the early Universe.
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Deligne

The Abel Prize 2013

This year's Abel Prize has been awarded to the Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne for "seminal contributions to algebraic geometry and for their transformative impact on number theory, representation theory, and related fields".
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How to add up quickly

The number pi can be expressed beautifully in terms of infinite sums. For practical purposes though, these sums are rather disappointing: they converge slowly, so you need to sum a large number of terms to get accurate estimates of pi. Here's a clever way to make them converge faster.
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Image of the Earth in someone's hands

Imagine a planet made of mathematics....

Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013 is a year-­long international effort highlighting the contributions made by mathematics in the study of global planetary problems: migrations, climate change, sustainability, natural disasters, pandemics... and in the search for solutions.
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newton

Maths in a minute: Newton's laws of motion

We've been dabbling a lot in the mysterious world of quantum physics lately, so to get back down to Earth we thought we'd bring you reminder of good old classical physics.

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Disease moves like ripples on a pond

Modelling the spread of disease is a difficult business. Epidemiologists use incredibly complex models involving huge amounts of transport, social contact and disease data to predict the spread of diseases. But is there a way to hide all this complexity and draw a simpler picture of how diseases spread, even in today's complex world?
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Prime time news!

They've done it again! GIMPS has discovered the largest known prime number: 257,885,161-1. This massive 17,425,170 digit number was discovered thanks to clever distributed computing software that uses idle computer time donated by volunteers.