(PhysOrg.com) -- Prime numbers have intrigued curious thinkers for centuries. On one hand, prime numbers seem to be randomly distributed among the natural numbers with no other law than that of chance. But on the other hand, ...
Most airlines board passengers the same way, first filling the seats in the back of the plane, and then moving to the front. After a recent experience boarding a plane in this manner, Fermilab physicist Jason Steffen wondered ...
When a thriving civilization suddenly collapses, it’s often a mystery – and an ominous one, at that. For Easter Island circa 1000-1400 AD, experts believe it was a case of humans overexploiting their natural resources ...
The way that a flock of birds flies or a school of fish swims may involve more than individuals simply judging the distance between themselves in the group. Recently, scientists from the University of Alberta have shown that ...
A transatlantic team of number-crunchers announced they had built a theoretical structure in 248 dimensions, resolving a 120-year puzzle that could be used to test theories about the structure of the cosmos.
Mathematics
Mar 19, 2007
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0
How will artificial intelligence affect the distribution of income and wealth this century? After falling through much of the 20th century, income inequality, measured as the fraction of income going to the richest 1% of ...
You can learn a lot from a little slime mold. For Nate Cira, assistant professor of biomedical engineering in Cornell Engineering, the tiny eukaryotic organism provided inspiration for modeling "traveling networks"—connected ...
Mathematics
Feb 26, 2025
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37
So-called Rayleigh–Bloch waves can release an enormous amount of energy that can damage technical systems under certain circumstances. They only exist below a precisely defined cut-off frequency; above this, they disappear ...
Mathematics
Feb 3, 2025
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57
Hula hooping is so commonplace that we may overlook some interesting questions it raises: "What keeps a hula hoop up against gravity?" and "Are some body types better for hula hooping than others?" A team of mathematicians ...
Mathematics
Jan 2, 2025
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228
Nonlinear dynamical systems are systems that can undergo sudden shifts not due to changes in their state or stability, but in response to the rate at which external conditions or parameters change. These sudden shifts, known ...
