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Life as we don't know it

Physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies has made an unusual move into the infant discipline of astrobiology. He tells Plus about his interest in the big questions: what is life, how would we recognise aliens - and are they all around us?
Article

Cracking codes, part II

In the second of two articles, Artur Ekert visits the strange subatomic world and investigates the possibility of unbreakable quantum cryptography.
Article

The magical mathematics of music

According to Shakespeare, music is the food of love. But Jeffrey Rosenthal follows Galileo's observation that the entire universe is written in the language of mathematics - and that includes music.
Article

Chaos in the brain

Saying that someone is a chaotic thinker might seem like an insult - but, according to Lewis Dartnell, it could be that the mathematical phenomenon of chaos is a crucial part of what makes our brains work.