Number theory, the study of the properties of positive integers, is perhaps the purest form of mathematics. At first sight, it may seem far too abstract to apply to the natural world. In fact, the influential American number ...
A 3D model of a 407-million-year-old plant fossil has overturned thinking on the evolution of leaves. The research has also led to fresh insights about spectacular patterns found in plants.
Long before Dr. Jukka Vayrynen was an assistant professor at the Purdue Department of Physics and Astronomy, he was a post-doc investigating a theoretical model with emergent particles in a condensed matter setting. Once ...
It was a good year for research of all kinds as three men shared the Nobel Prize in physics for their work that showed that tiny particles separated from one another at great distances can be entangled. Alain Aspect, John ...
Amber Heard has one of the world's most beautiful faces—that is, according to cosmetic surgeon Julian De Silva. The claim has been recycled for some years now, and recently resurfaced in the wake of Heard's (widely reported) ...
By shining a laser pulse sequence inspired by the Fibonacci numbers at atoms inside a quantum computer, physicists have created a remarkable, never-before-seen phase of matter. The phase has the benefits of two time dimensions ...
Numbers like π, e and φ often turn up in unexpected places in science and mathematics. Pascal's triangle and the Fibonacci sequence also seem inexplicably widespread in nature. Then there's the Riemann zeta function, a ...
When people are asked to draw the flower of a sunflower plant, almost everyone draws a large circle encircled by yellow petals.
Researchers at EPFL have shown that electromagnetic waves coupled to precisely engineered structures known as artificial ferromagnetic quasicrystals allow for more efficient information transmission and processing at the ...
Patterns appear widely throughout nature and math, from the Fibonacci spirals of sea shells to the periodicity of crystals. But certain math problems can sometimes trick the human solver into seeing a pattern, but then, out ...
