Credit: Yale University A new Yale School of Public Health study found that slot machines, or “one-armed bandits,” may offer a clue to how AIDS programs can better locate persons living with undiagnosed HIV infection. “When you walk into a casino and see a row of slot machines how do you decide which one to…
Theresa May has been accused of an “absolute affront” to democracy after dumping dozens of official documents online on parliament’s last day of term, showing the police force numbers have dropped to a 30-year low and the number of soldiers has fallen by 7,000. The government has published very little for weeks after the election…
In 2014 the Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, who has died aged 40 of cancer, was awarded the Fields medal, the discipline’s most celebrated prize. The 52 previous recipients had all been men. Maryam won it “for her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces”. Surfaces are basic objects…
Two queueing theorists of Ghent University investigated why queues at restrooms are invariably longer for ladies than for men. Time and time again. What are the main causes for this disparity? And how can it be overcome? Moving to unisex toilets, it appears from this study, may reduce waiting times for women from over 6…
Mathematiciangenius Maryam Mirzakhani won a string of honours during her career including the coveted Fields Medal in 2014 Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian-born mathematician who was the first woman to win the coveted Fields Medal, has died in a US hospital after a battle with cancer. She was 40. Mirzakhani’ friend Firouz Naderi announced her death…
The rarefied world of international mathematics competitions has traditionally been where brainy teenage boys show their genius for problem solving. This year however, for the first time in a quarter of a century, two girls have made it into the UK squad for the International Mathematical Olympiad, the largest, oldest and most prestigious of international…
Experimental network (right) and four modules with different living conditions. Credit: Andrew Gonzalez, Luis J. Gilarranz et al./CSIC (Phys.org)—A team of researchers from Spain, Switzerland and Canada has used common springtails to prove the soundness of a theory that suggests that modularity limits disturbance effects in networks. In their paper published in the journal Science,…
Credit: CC0 Public Domain A psychological intervention implemented to help students cope and learn more in a tough statistics course did more than just help them in the class, a new study found. Researchers found the intervention helped students improve their math literacy – what scientists call ‘numeracy‘ – which was vital for success in…
Predicting natural disasters remains one of the most challenging problems in simulation science because not only are they rare but also because only few of the millions of entries in datasets relate to extreme events. A systematic method for comparing the accuracy of different types of simulation models for such prediction problems has recently been…
Credit: Shutterstock Oxford Mathematician Neave O’Clery works with mathematical models to describe the processes behind industrial diversification and economic growth. Here she discusses her work in Oxford and previously at Harvard to explain how network science can help us understand why some cities thrive and grow, and others decline, and how they can offer useful,…