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A longstanding question in mathematics that has puzzled countless bright minds throughout the ages is the twin prime conjecture. The conjecture, that some believe was first stated by ancient Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria, says that that there is an infinite number of prime “twin pairs” – pairs of prime numbers that differ in value by 2. These […]
Physics and heavy metal may not have much in common, but Matt Bierbaum and Jesse Silverberg have found a connection. Both of them are graduate students at Cornell University – and both of them love heavy metal and headbanging. It all started when Silverberg, who really loves rocking out, took his girlfriend to a metal […]
It’s a big day for math wizzez around the world – the largest known prime number has just shot up: (257,885,161 – 1) breaks a four year dry spell in finding new prime numbers. Prime numbers are numbers that can only be divided by themselves and 1. Going up from 2, the prime numbers are […]
As a geologist, I tend to see the Earth as a dynamic setting, with all sorts of processes taking place; however, for me, 100.000 years is a really short period. For other, normal people, over the course of decades and centuries, the Earth is really static, with mountains and valleys seemingly anchored firmly in place. […]
There’s a rather common image that might pop inside someone’s head when thinking of penguins – an entire flock of such animals, standing very close together, keeping themselves warm as they confront extreme sub-zero antarctic temperatures. Don’t be fooled, though. According to the results of a mathematical simulation that modeled penguin huddling, the penguins stick […]
What’s halfway between 1 and 9? If you’re like most people, you’d answer 5 or 4.5 – which is fine. But if you take a 6 year old kid on the other hand and ask him the same question, the odds are he’ll answer 3. According to a recent study, the great majority of children […]
You’re not the only that doesn’t like math, it seems. A new study from scientists at Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences found that biologists pay less attention to theories that are dense with mathematical detail. The scientists involved in the study compared citation data with the number of equations per page in more than 600 evolutionary biology papers […]
Alan Turing is considered by most to be the father of the computer; the British mathematician had one of the most tragic fates ever suffered by scientists. Aside from defining concepts such as ‘algorithm’ and ‘artificial intelligence’, he also put up an idea that repetitive biological patterns are generated by a pair of morphogens that […]
The Fourier transformation is arguably the most important algorithm in information technology, with immense applications as well in optics, signal and image processing, pattern recognition etc. Thanks to this remarkable mathematical operation, we’re able to see videos or listen to music on an iPod, as it turns the digital information into readable frequencies. Recently, MIT […]
A team of Swedish scientists paired with a USC researcher to crack the Copiale Cipher, thus revealing secret rituals and beliefs of a secret German society that had a fascination for ophtalmology. Thousands of old and obscure symbols filled over 100 pages of text which was found in Berlin towards the end of the Cold […]
Whether its filling the space between oranges in a box or squeezing molecules between cells, wasted storage space is a problem to which people, and especially companies, have been trying to find a solution for a long time. A recently published research might lead to dramatic improvements of storage capabilities and in the field of […]
Prediction made by UCLA geographers Thomas Gillespie, John Agnew, and a whole class of undergrads regarding where Osama Bin Laden might be hiding turned out to be surprisingly accurate, surprising scientists and authorities alike. They created a probabilistic model which concluded that there is a 88.9% chance that he is hiding in a city less […]
In case you don’t know, Futurama is a popular science fiction – I highly recommend it, as a matter of fact, but that’s more of a personal preference. What’s interesting about it is that a mathematical theory was created especially for it, or for an episode to be more exact. The theory refers to a […]
Religion is nowadays an extremely touchy subject; if you ask religious people about non religious people there’s a good chance you will get a pretty nasty response, something involving a kind of hell and divine punishment, while if you ask the other group, probably some bad words will probably come up. If you ask me, […]
Dr. Beverly Goodman of the Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences at the University of Haifa was doing some research on the ancient port and shipwrecks of the place, when she stumbled upon information that led her to this conclusion. “There is a likely chance of tsunami waves reaching the shores of Israel. Tsunami […]
Don’t imagine a yellow, puffy golden chick doing complicated equations (as awesome as that would be) as it would be far from the truth. However, the scientific fact is very interesting in itself as the little birds are able to do some adding and subtracting, in an animal version, of course. The experiment used on […]
Snowflakes have fascinated most of us since the beggining of time. They say that there are no two snowflakes alike and that isn’t very far away from the truth. No two snowflakes are truly alike, but they can be very similar to each other, said Janko Gravner, a mathematics professor at UC Davis. Now he […]
