News

Plus Advent Calendar Door #19: All you need is love!
Everybody needs a little love on a cold, wet Monday morning, so here's some for you with lots of kisses from the Plus team!
Plus Advent Calendar Door #18: Olympic fever
Oooh! It's only 222 days until the start of the London 2012 Olympic Games! Eagerly clutching our tickets to the women's handball quarter finals we've been going around gathering some Olympic material for you. Here's what we found.
Plus Advent Calendar Door #17: Celebrating Alan Turing!
2012 is Turing year, celebrating 100 years since the great mathematician and code breaker's birth. We'll be joining in the celebrations, but here's a little preview.
Maths in the City!
Our cities are filled with buildings, roads, cars, buses, trains, bikes, parks and gardens. They are crisscrossed with power, water, sewage and transport systems. They are built by engineers, architects, planners, technologists, doctors, designers and artists. Our cities are shaped by our environment, our society and our culture. And each and every part is built on mathematics. Join Rachel Thomas, co-editor of Plus, in a public lecture exploring the maths in our cities.
The Plus Advent Calendar Door #16: Treat your ears
Plus has been working with lots of fascinating, funny and famous mathematicians over the years. And since we've started producing podcasts in 2007, we can bring their voices directly to your ears. From Roger Penrose and Paul Davies to the science writer Simon Singh and the engineers behind the London 2012 velodrome, find out what they have to say.
Plus Advent Calendar Door #15: Strange shapes
Having trouble wrapping your presents? Paper always ends up in a mess? Well, whatever geometrical shape you've accidentally produced, we bet it's not as wonderful as these favourites.
Plus Advent Calendar Door #14: Beautiful symmetry
Snow flakes, ice crystals, beautiful round baubles — Christmas is the time of symmetry, so here's a few articles to celebrate it!
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.

Plus Advent Calendar Door #13: Unreasonable effectiveness
Maths is a creation of our brains, so how come it describes the world around us so amazingly well? How is it that ideas from pure maths suddenly find real-world applications decades or even centuries after their discovery? Here are some articles exploring the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.
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.
Plus Advent Calendar Door #12: No pain on the brain
You would not have thought it, but while you sit contentedly digesting your turkey and gazing at the telly, your brain is keeping up the hard work, making sure that everything in your body goes according to plan. And to understand this most amazing of nature's creations you need maths. Here are some of our favourite articles on brains, human and animal.
Plus Advent Calendar Door #11: Quantum mysteries
>It may be Sunday but that's no excuse for resting your brain. Plus has been grappling hard with the strange weirdnesses of quantum mechanics lately, and we think that you should too. So get ready to be mind-boggled.