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Gut logic

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.
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John Conway - discovering free will (part II)

In this, the second part of our interview, John Conway explains how the Kochen-Specker Theorem from 1965 not only seemed to explain the EPR Paradox, it also provided the first hint of Conway and Kochen's Free Will Theorem.
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John Conway – discovering free will (part I)

On August 19, 2004, John Conway was standing with his friend Simon Kochen at the blackboard in Kochen’s office in Princeton. They had been trying to understand a thought experiment involving quantum physics and relativity. What they discovered, and how they described it, created one of the most controversial theorems of their careers: The Free Will Theorem.
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Higgs boson

Hooray for Higgs!

"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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Spooky action found in gases

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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The mathematics of your next family reunion

The festive season can only mean one thing... getting together with the family! You might not be able to choose your family, but at least now you'll know exactly what you share in common!
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YouTube launches numberphile

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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Decoding Da Vinci: Finance, functions and art

Dan Brown in his book, The Da Vinci Code, talks about the "divine proportion" as having a "fundamental role in nature". Brown's ideas are not completely without foundation, as the proportion crops up in the mathematics used to describe the formation of natural structures like snail's shells and plants, and even in Alan Turing's work on animal coats. But Dan Brown does not talk about mathematics, he talks about a number. What is so special about this number?
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Understanding uncertainty: Visualising probabilities

Probabilities and statistics: they are everywhere, but they are hard to understand and can be counter-intuitive. So what's the best way of communicating them to an audience that doesn't have the time, desire, or background to get stuck into the numbers? This article explores modern visualisation techniques and finds that the right picture really can be worth a thousand words.