Probability and the Birthday Paradox

Key concepts [More]


Read more »

What the fractal?

As part of my job at RiAus I get asked to write the occasional blog about an upcoming event. I wrote this for an event that occured last week about fractal geometry with the amazing Prof. Michael Barnsley . It was a great event and my blog post was just a little teaser for it.

Rhythm and Music Help Math Students

Stuck on a tricky math problem? Start clapping. Grade school kids who learned about fractions through a rhythm-and-music-based curriculum outperformed their peers in traditional math classes. The work is in Educational Studies in Mathematics . [Susan Joan Courey et al., " Academic music: music instruction to engage third-grade students in learning basic fraction concepts "]

High Status Breeds Feelings of Trust

High status confers a rosy worldview, according to research available online last August in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes . Psychologists asked college students to write essays about having more prestige than others or being low on the totem pole, thus priming them to think of themselves as having either high or low status. Then the students were told they could send $10 to an unseen partner; the money would be tripled, and the phantom partner would return as much as he wanted. Forty percent of the high-status group sent the $10 versus 12 percent of the low-status group.

Snowflake Growth Successfully Modeled from Physical Laws

Windswept from cloud to cloud until they flutter to Earth, snowflakes assume a seemingly endless variety of shapes. Some have the perfect symmetry of a six-pointed star, some are hexagons adorned with hollow columns, whereas others resemble needles, prisms or the branches of a Christmas tree.

Juice Box Geometry

Key concepts [More]


Read more »

Readers Respond to "Can We Feed the World and Sustain the Planet?" and Other Articles

ENTOMOLOGICAL ETHICS [More]


Read more »

How to Make Science and Tech Jobs More Enticing to Undergrads

The number of U.S. undergraduate degrees being awarded in most STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math) has risen steadily in recent years{link to G Sci page}. Yet some American employers say they are having trouble finding candidates to fill STEM jobs. The mismatch is not occurring because of an actual shortage of graduates; the numbers of job openings and new degree holders align fairly closely. And the shortfall is not because more foreign-born students are returning home after earning U.S. degrees, as has been rumored lately.

The Not-So-Hot Hand

Reggie Miller, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant. They’ve all gone on seemingly memorable shooting streaks. But past research has shown that the so-called hot hand is a myth, rooted in our tendency to see patterns where there are none.

Are Physical Constants Really Constant?

Some things never change. physicists call them the constants of nature. Such quantities as the velocity of light, c , Newton’s constant of gravitation, G , and the mass of the electron, m e , are assumed to be the same at all places and times in the universe. They form the scaffolding around which the theories of physics are erected, and they define the fabric of our universe. Physics has progressed by making ever more accurate measurements of their values.

A Brief History of Clocks

Humankind’s efforts to tell time have helped drive the evolution of our technology and science throughout history. The need to gauge the divisions of the day and night led the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to create sundials, water clocks and other early chronometric tools. Western Europeans adopted these tech­nologies, but by the 13th century, demand for a dependable timekeeping instrument led medieval artisans to invent the mechanical clock. Although this new device satisfied the requirements of monastic and urban communities, it was too inaccurate and unreliable for scientific application until the pendulum was employed to govern its operation. The precision timekeepers that were subsequently developed resolved the critical problem of finding a ship’s position at sea and went on to play key roles in the industrial revolution and the advance of Western civilization.

Stephen Hawking, "Equal to Anything!" [Excerpt]

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from the chapter "Equal to Anything!" from the new book Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), by Kitty Ferguson . [More]


Read more »

Gingrich Tops Scientific American 's Geek Guide to the 2012 GOP Candidates

The contenders for the Republican nomination in the 2012 U.S. presidential election may appear to be a fairly uniform group of middle-aged white conservatives, but when it comes to issues of science, technology and overall geek cred, none of these candidates is cut from the same cloth. In fact, Newt Gingrich nudges out Mitt Romney and Ron Paul in Scientific American 's overall ranking, based on the former Congressman's engagement in issues related to energy, the Internet and military weapons, combined with his mastery of top online tools such as Twitter and a healthy appetite for science nonfiction.

The Math behind Screening Tests

It seems like every few months a new study points out the inefficacy of yet another wide-scale cancer screening. In 2009 the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force sug­gested that many women undergo mam­mograms later and less frequently than had been recommended before because there seems to be little, if any, extra benefit from annual tests. This same group recently issued an even more pointed statement about the prostate-specific antigen test for prostate cancer: it blights many lives but overall doesn’t save them.

Anything Boys Can Do...

When then Harvard University president Lawrence Summers suggested in 2005 that innate differences between men and women may account for the lack of women in top science and engineering positions (and subsequently resigned), he was referring to the greater male variability hypothesis. Women, it holds, are on average as mathematically competent as men, but there is a greater innate spread in math ability among men. In other words, a higher proportion of men stumble mathematically, but an equally high proportion excel because of something in the way male brains develop. This supposedly explained why boys tend to dominate math competitions and why men far outnumber women in elite university math departments. Since then, scientists have put the variability hypothesis to the test, and it comes up short.

Pigeons Can Follow Abstract Number-Counting Rules

Several vertebrate species can distinguish between, say, two and five bananas--but with the exception of primates, they can’t grasp the numerical rules that would let them arrange their piles of fruit from least to most. Now, new research suggests that pigeons, like primates, can follow these abstract numerical rules. The study is in the journal Science . [Damian Scarf, Harlene Hayne and Michael Colombo, " Pigeons on Par with Primates in Numerical Competence "]

Tantalizing Hints of Elusive Higgs Particle Announced [Update]

GENEVA--The two largest collaborations of physicists in history Tuesday presented intriguing but tentative clues to the existence of the Higgs boson , the elementary particle thought to endow ordinary matter with mass.

Has the Higgs Been Discovered? Physicists Gear Up for Watershed Announcement

The physics buzz reached a frenzy in the past few days over the announcement that the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva is planning to release what is widely expected to be tantalizing--although not conclusive--evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, the elementary particle hypothesized to be the origin of the mass of all matter.

Hoopsters Believe In Hot-or-Not Hand

“Three seconds to shoot. It’s Reggie! And it’s Indiana by eight!” Reggie Miller, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant. They’ve all gone on seemingly memorable shooting streaks. But past research has shown that the so-called "hot hand" is a myth, rooted in our tendency to see patterns where there are none.

Human Genome Untangled in 3-D [Video]

Erez Lieberman Aiden was an undergraduate at Princeton University in 2000 when scientists announced with great fanfare that they had sequenced the first human genome , yielding a trove of information about what happens inside every human cell. But Aiden wondered what it would be like to see what was happening inside a human cell. How does this gigantic genome--which would stretch 2 meters if you unwound it from its 5-micron-wide coil in the nucleus--actually go about its work?