Content about “

medicine and health

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Resonant electromagnetic waves, created by lightning flashes, circle the Earth. Wim Hordijk explores the maths and shows how you can keep track with these phenomena.

Cambridge researchers, the BBC, and thousands of citizen scientists have created a revolutionary infectious disease data set.

Take part in an exciting new project and help fight future pandemics!

Why a positive test result doesn't necessarily mean you have the disease.

Sara Zahedi has won a prestigious prize at the European Congress of Maths. Your future medical diagnoses, and even the welfare of sea life, may depend on her work.

In 2012 the UK government launched a list of the Eight Great technologies of the future. Here's what they are and what role maths has to play in them.

Why maths is an important tool in the fight against Ebola.

Geometric hallucinations are very common: people get them after taking drugs, following sensory deprivation, or even after rubbing their eyes. What can they tell us about how our brain works?

When NASA first decided to put a man on the Moon they had a problem: once the Apollo spacecraft was in flight, they would not be able to observe its exact location and neither would they be able to predict it using physics. How could they send astronauts to the Moon if they didn't know where they were? An ingenious mathematician came up with an answer.

Horses, like all animals, have a number of different gaits. But how can they perform these complicated leg movements without having to stop and think? And why do they switch to a new gait when they want to go faster? Mathematics can shed some light on these questions.

Recent discoveries have made it possible to control computer games by thought alone, or work out what kind of item someone is thinking about from their brain signals. And that's not all. Researchers were able to use brain scans to reconstruct what someone was looking at. In these experiments the scientists were literally able to see what people were thinking. A worrying thought, perhaps. But how did they do it?