Articles

Hubble's top five scientific achievements
On May 19 2009 the Space Shuttle Atlantis released the Hubble Space Telescope back into orbit after a hugely successful servicing mission. To mark the occasion, Mario Livio, one of the scientists involved in the mission and intimately acquainted with Hubble, takes stock of its scientific legacy.
Particle hunting at the LHC
It's hard to avoid CERN these days. Last year's successful switch-on of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, followed by a blow-out which is currently being fixed, sparked wide-spread media coverage, and currently CERN stars in the Tom Hanks movie Angels and Demons. So what goes on at CERN and why the hubbub about the Large Hadron Collider, known as the LHC? Ben Allanach investigates.
Lambda marks the spot — the biggest problem in theoretical physics
The mathematical maps in theoretical physics have been highly successful in guiding our understanding of the universe at the largest and smallest scales. Linking these two scales together is one of the golden goals of theoretical physics. But, at the very edges of our understanding of these fields, one of the most controversial areas of physics lies where these maps merge: the cosmological constant problem.
The expression that (nearly) explained the Universe
Sophie Butchart finds mysterious patterns in the solar system
Editorial
And the winner is...
Knitting by numbers
Lucinda Mathews visualises tricky surfaces
The Carol syndrome
José-Manuel Rey unveils the curse of attractiveness
Outer space: Are the constants of nature really constant?
Are the unchanging features of the Universe really unchanging?
Beauty in mathematics
Surein Aziz explores one of the most beautiful equations in mathematics
How maths killed Lehman Brothers
Horatio Boedihardjo explains the credit crunch
Thinking outside the box
Sonia Buckley travels through higher dimensions
It's all in the detail
The computer animation used in movies and games is now so lifelike, it is very hard to believe that you are actually watching a surface built from simple shapes of triangles. Phil Dench tells Plus how he uses mathematics to help bring these models to life.