One cornerstone of the Science 2.0 approach is the framework for making Big Data manageable. In fields from physics to biology, it's no longer a question of obtaining data, but managing it in ways that are relevant.
It's been problematic in science just as it has been in business and the public sector because relationships between the different parts of a network have been represented as simple links, regardless of how many ways they can actually interact, and that results in a loss of valuable information in science.
Science 2.0: Quantum Theory Makes Big Data Manageable
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Multifractals Point To Existence Of Unknown Physical Mechanism On The Sun
The famous sunspots on the surface of the Earth's star result from strong magnetic fields. Their numbers are an important indicator of the state of activity on the Sun.
At the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków, Poland, researchers have been conducting multifractal analysis into the changes in the numbers of sunspots and found that the graphs were asymmetrical in shape, suggesting that sunspots may be involved in unknown physical processes.
At the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków, Poland, researchers have been conducting multifractal analysis into the changes in the numbers of sunspots and found that the graphs were asymmetrical in shape, suggesting that sunspots may be involved in unknown physical processes.
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Are We Living In A Hologram? Is The Universe A 2-D Projection On The Cosmic Horizon?
There is not the slightest doubt that the the universe is real. It is three-dimensional.
But one popular alternative notion has been the "holographic principle", which asserts that a mathematical description of the universe only requires two dimensions. What we perceive as three dimensional may just be the image of two dimensional processes on a huge cosmic horizon.
Up until now, this speculation has only been mathematically analyzed in exotic spaces with negative curvature. Math, like any language, can talk about lots of things that are not possible and such spaces are quite different from the space in our own universe.
A new paper suggests that the holographic principle even holds in a flat spacetime.
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Non-Euclidean Geometries For Our Brain Grid Cells
It took human culture millennia to arrive at a mathematical formulation of non-Euclidean spaces - but that was not because of a limitation of our brains.
Instead, it's likely that even the brains of rodents get there very naturally every day.
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The Mathematical Pattern Of Ants Marching
When ants go exploring in search of food they end up choosing collective routes that fit statistical distributions of probability, according to a team of mathematicians who analyzed the trails of a species of Argentine ant.
It's unknown how flocks of birds, shoals of fish, lines of ants and other complex natural systems organize themselves so well when moving collectively so researchers from Spain and the U.S. analyzed the movements of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile, an invasive species in many parts of the world) while they forage or explore an empty space (a petri dish) and then they proposed a model explaining how they form their routes.
It's unknown how flocks of birds, shoals of fish, lines of ants and other complex natural systems organize themselves so well when moving collectively so researchers from Spain and the U.S. analyzed the movements of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile, an invasive species in many parts of the world) while they forage or explore an empty space (a petri dish) and then they proposed a model explaining how they form their routes.
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Why B.B. King Was Great: He Played Out Of Tune
There are those who believed that B.B. King wasn’t the world’s greatest guitar player, including the man himself. In a recent interview he said:
I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never heard me call myself a blues guitar man. Well, that’s because there’s been so many can do it better'n I can, play the blues better'n me.
And his musical vocabulary was limited. King once told Bono: “I’m no good with chords, so what we do is, uh, get somebody else to play chords… I’m horrible with chords”. He even claimed that he couldn’t play and sing at the same time.
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The Math Of Social Structure: How Birds Avoid A Collision Course
Mathematical biologist Dr. Jamie Wood wanted to know how birds collectively negotiate man-made obstacles such as wind turbines which lie in their flight paths and that led to a research project with colleagues in the Departments of Biology and Mathematics at York and scientists at the Animal and Plant Health Agency which found that the social structure of groups of migratory birds may have a significant effect on their vulnerability to avoid collisions with obstacles, particularly wind turbines.
The researchers created a range of computer simulations to explore if social hierarchies are beneficial to navigation, and how collision risk is affected by environmental conditions and the birds’ desire to maintain an efficient direct flight path.
The researchers created a range of computer simulations to explore if social hierarchies are beneficial to navigation, and how collision risk is affected by environmental conditions and the birds’ desire to maintain an efficient direct flight path.
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Edit Distance In Genomes - Longstanding Algorithm Worry Put To Rest
Comparing the genomes of different species — or different members of the same species — is the basis of a great deal of modern biology because DNA sequences conserved across species are likely to be functionally important, while variations between members of the same species can indicate different susceptibilities to disease.
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Mathematics And Spaghetti Carbonara
I’ve come to believe that mathematics, as an investigative science, as a practical discipline and as a creative art, shares many characteristics with cookery. It’s not just spaghetti alla carbonara, it’s the whole business of inventing dishes and preparing them. It’s an analogy with many parts, and it has consequences.
To introduce myself: I’m a professional mathematician, an amateur cook and an enthusiastic eater. The ideas in this essay are distilled from years of formal reasoning, mad culinary experiments and adventurous meals. In short, I’ve found that:
I do mathematics for much the same reasons that I cook.
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Weyl Points: Wanted For 86 Years
Weyl points, the 3D analogues of the structures that make graphene exceptional, were theoretically predicted in 1929. Today, an international team of Physicists from MIT and Zhejiang University, found them in photonic crystals, opening a new dimension in photonics.
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27 Factors To Aid In Early Detection Of Sepsis - All By Algorithm
Sepsis kills more Americans every year than AIDS, breast cancer and prostate cancer combined but it gets far less attention. Unlike those other diseases, hours can make the difference between life and death in sepsis.
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Is Failure To Reproduce Psychology Papers A Sign They Are Invalid?
Following one of the largest-scale scientific reproducibility investigations to date, a group of psychology researchers has reported results from an effort to replicate 100 recently published psychology studies; though they were able to successfully repeat the original experiments in most all cases, they were able to reproduce the original results in less than half, they report.
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What Brewing Coffee Can Teach Us About Modeling Anesthesia
By Michael Greshko, Inside Science– Mathematics that can describe coffeepots, forest fires and flu outbreaks may also underpin the brain’s response to anesthesia, a new study suggests.The mathematical model of the brain, published in Physical Review Letters, marks the latest attempt to simulate the surprisingly complicated effects of general anesthetics across the brain.
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Resonating Euler Spirals and Prolate Spheroids
You might call it a two-tone football. If you're a real mathematician you may be able to explain to me what the real name of the thing is. I'm not a real mathematician but I occasionally wrangle with math problems as visualized surfaces in my head. It's like speaking in metaphor without knowing where the metaphors came from or what they mean. I have a thin grasp of what an Euler Spiral is and I sort of understand that the surface of an American-style football is a Prolate Spheroid. Put those two concepts together and you come up with the Yin and Yang of the Yellow Brick Road, which leads to discovery and greater knowledge.
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Mathematically Modeling The Mind
Try to remember a phone number, and you're using what's called your sequential memory. This kind of memory, in which your mind processes a sequence of numbers, events, or ideas, underlies how people think, perceive, and interact as social beings.
"In our life, all of our behaviors and our process of thinking is sequential in time," said Mikhail Rabinovich, a physicist and neurocognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego.
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How Understanding Baseball Can Improve Earthquake Predictions
Major League Baseball can help understand why maps used to predict shaking in future earthquakes often do poorly.
Earthquake hazard maps use assumptions about where, when, and how big future earthquakes will be to predict the level of shaking. The results are used in designing earthquake-resistant buildings. However, as the study's lead author, earth science and statistics graduate student Edward Brooks, explains "sometimes the maps do well, and sometimes they do poorly. In particular, the shaking and thus damage in some recent large earthquakes was much larger than expected."
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Discovery Of Pi In Quantum Mechanics A 'Cunning Piece Of Magic'
While most people associate the mathematical constant π (pi) with arcs and circles, mathematicians are accustomed to seeing it in a variety of fields. Two University of Rochester scientists have found it lurking in a quantum mechanics formula for the energy states of the hydrogen atom.
"We found the classic 17th century Wallis formula for pi, making us the first to derive it from physics, in general, and quantum mechanics, in particular," said Tamar Friedmann, a visiting assistant professor of mathematics and a research associate of high energy physics, and co-author of a paper published this week in the Journal of Mathematical Physics.
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Poll Averaging Was No More Accurate In 2012 Than It Is Now
In 2012, the enthusiasm for poll averaging reached a fever pitch. Very few people were critical of it and instead talked about how science had taken over predictive politics. (1)
I was critical of the accuracy and swam against the tide of those in media gushing about the new frontier opened up by New York Times statistical pundit Nate Silver and others, which posited that we could now predict outcomes with unprecedented accuracy. 'They don't do any polls,' I noted, 'So we are supposed to believe there is some miracle of weighting they do in polls done by someone else.' It's the same flaw we find in epidemiology when a scholar does an unweighted random effects meta-analysis to conclude organic strawberries taste better or whatever.
I was critical of the accuracy and swam against the tide of those in media gushing about the new frontier opened up by New York Times statistical pundit Nate Silver and others, which posited that we could now predict outcomes with unprecedented accuracy. 'They don't do any polls,' I noted, 'So we are supposed to believe there is some miracle of weighting they do in polls done by someone else.' It's the same flaw we find in epidemiology when a scholar does an unweighted random effects meta-analysis to conclude organic strawberries taste better or whatever.
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Global Warming Disaster Could Suffocate All Life On Earth, Say Mathematicians
Falling oxygen levels caused by global warming could be a greater threat to the survival of life on planet Earth than flooding, according to an estimate led by Sergei Petrovskii, Professor in Applied Mathematics from the University of Leicester's Department of Mathematics.
Their mathematical model estimates that an increase in the water temperature of the world's oceans of around six degrees Celsius, which the most aggressive claims (two degrees is the scientific consensus) say could occur as soon as 2100, could stop oxygen production by phytoplankton by disrupting the process of photosynthesis.
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'Freak' Ocean Waves Hit Without Warning, Says Math Simulation
Mariners have long spoken of 'walls of water' appearing from nowhere in the open seas, that is why freak waves are called freak waves.
Oceanographers have disregarded such stories and instead suggested that rogue waves - enormous surface waves that have attained a near-mythical status over the centuries - build up gradually and have relatively narrow crests, but new research says rogue (or freak) waves can emerge suddenly, being preceded by much smaller waves. At least in mathematical models published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A.
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