In 2004 three physicists decided to dabble in a field they knew little about. Within weeks they had developed a new technique that transforms weeks' worth of computer calculations into something that could be done on a single page in an hour. It's used in particle accelerators such as the LHC at CERN.

The natural logarithm is intimately related to the number e and that's how we learn about it at school. When it was first invented, though, people hadn't even heard of the number e and they weren't thinking about exponentiation either. How is that possible?

This year's PISA results have caused predictable headlines, but do the statistics add up?

A 1 in 14 million chance to win the lottery, a 5% risk of cancer, a 50:50 chance of heads on a coin — we deal with probabilities all the time, but do they actually mean anything? We explore the philosophy of probability and ask whether the probabilities that come up in physics differ from those in every day life.

Are there objective chances in the world?

The fact that a sizeable proportion of the financial workforce is made up of physicists is one of the industry's best-kept secrets. We talk to Laura Tadrowski, who has made the leap from physics to finance.

If chemistry makes you think of white lab coats and green liquids then think again. This year's Nobel prize goes to three researchers who "took chemical experiment into cyberspace".

The 2013 Nobel prize in physics goes to Peter Higgs and François Englert for proposing the mechanism that gives things mass.

Why does time only ever move in one direction? We talk to philosophers of physics Jeremy Butterfield and David Wallace, as well as the eminent Roger Penrose about the puzzle time poses to physicists and what it has to do with the Big Bang and the second law of thermodynamics.

Is the Universe finite or infinite? Is there infinity inside a black hole? Is space infinitely divisible or is there a shortest length? We talk to philosophers and physicists to find out.

A team of Australian researchers has delivered dire news for polar ecosystems, predicting that in some regions biodiversity may be reduced by as much as a third within decades. It's the result of a tipping point induced by global warming.