Nanotechnology has invaded the fuel tank. But forget Prince Charles’s “grey goo” and science fiction tales of rampaging swarms of nano-robots. This invader is a harmless diesel fuel additive, and just a teaspoon in your tank can not only increase your fuel economy by up to 10 per cent, but significantly cut harmful exhaust emissions.
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The main supposition of John Gray’s hypothesis, “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”, seems to be that the two sexes followed largely independent evolutionary paths on Earth’s planetary neighbours before migrating to their current terrestrial territory. The theory has come to be known (well, by us at any rate) as the multi-planetary hypothesis for the origin of sexual dimorphism. This resettlement was very recent on an evolutionary timescale, so that neither males nor females have had sufficient time to re-adapt to the new conditions, and so retain many behavioural and morphological phenotypic traits that were adaptations to the original environments of their ancestral homes. Here, we critically analysed this claim that each gender’s ancestral home predetermines attributes of their personality.
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Despite its ubiquity, text messaging is still infuriatingly fiddly. Mobile buttons seem to have been designed for only the nimblest of virtuoso-pianist fingers, and a hurried txt often results in a confused mess of superfluous letters. Even if every care is taken over precision-pressing, there is still the spectre of the predictive text synonym (coined here as the textonym or ‘txtonym’) to contend with – the set of words in English that are made up of the same sequence of key-presses. For example, pub and rub are both ‘spelt’ 7‑8‑2.
Here, an exhaustive search of all possible txtonyms is performed, in order to warn people of the worst pitfalls to be avoided as well as show up some of the more humorous coincidences.
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Dr Who’s TARDIS may not have been quite so far-fetched an idea after all. A canister filled with new ‘nanocubes’ is able to hold several times more gas than an empty one. These crystals were developed by scientists working for chemical giant BASF, and are fantastically porous. Just a thimbleful has the surface area of a football pitch. What’s more, they are formed in a reaction so simple it could be done in a school chemistry lab. The crystals represent part of the company’s commitment to the emerging field of nanotechnology – materials on the scale of a billionth of a meter. In the case of their nanocubes, it is only the pores that are nano-scale – the crystals themselves are the size of salt grains.
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The USS Enterprise drops out of warp and slips into a parking orbit around an uncharted alien planet. The Captain orders a scan for lifesigns and, within seconds, he is told exactly what lifeforms are present, including the pre-industrial humanoids on the southern continent. How feasible is this, really?
Summer is rubbish for two fundamental reasons. One: wasps set about stinging everything with two legs without doing anything useful with their time like making honey or pollinating stuff. Two: girlfriends always want to go off on picnics. Avoiding having to eat al fresco was the sole reason our ancestors stopped messing about in trees and found some good caves instead. Picnics are inherently stressful; the apple juice invariably leaks into the bag, the Sports section blows away, and it is always always impossible to find a spot good enough to settle down on. The problem is that as soon as you approach that idyllic lush area of grass you spied from afar it starts looking nasty and patchy. The grass really does seem to always be greener on the other side, or at least further away.
The word “stealth” is often associated with high-tech bombers built to be invisible to enemy radar. This technology works through the aircraft’s surface being specially designed and having a covering of radar-absorbent skin that ensures minimal radio waves are reflected back to the enemy radar transmitter.
There is another kind of stealth, however, that does not rely on hiding the presence of an object, but on masking the fact that it is moving. If the pursuer approaches along a particular trajectory it appears to remain perfectly stationary from the point of view of the target. The pursuer can use this “motion camouflage” to rush right up to the target before it is perceived as a threat. This technique could be used by missiles to remain undetected for as long as possible, and even appears to have been discovered by nature. There is good evidence that hoverflies and dragonflies have evolved this strategy to fly without being detected.
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The world around us is full of relationships, rhythms, correlations, patterns. And mathematics underlies all of these, and can be used to predict future outcomes. Our brains have evolved to survive in this world: to analyse the information it receives through our senses and spot patterns in the complexity around us. In fact, it’s thought that the mathematical structure embedded in the rhythm and melody of music is what our brains latch on to, and that this is why we enjoy listening to it. It is perhaps not surprising then that there is a great deal of overlap between mathematics and the art that our brain finds so pleasing to look at.
This article is a whistle-stop tour of some of the types of art with a strong mathematical component, or conversely where a mathematical visualisation has an astonishing beauty.
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We’ve all experienced it. It’s Monday morning, you’ve slept through your alarm and are now in a hopeless rush to get in on time. The toast comes out of the toaster, you give it a quick sweep of butter, or in these more health-conscious times, margarine, and pick it up to take over to your newspaper on the kitchen table. And then it happens. Whether it simply slips out of your fingers, or it burns slightly and you subconsciously release it, the toast begins to drop towards the filthy floor. You watch in dismay as the toast falls, neatly performing a half-turn and landing flat on the floor, butter-side down in the grime. You don’t even know why you tentatively hoped for the toast to land otherwise – the Universe seems out to get you as far as free falling toast is concerned.
Cuttlefish have an extraordinary, and almost instantaneous, control over their appearance. They can produce hundreds of distinct patterns, which they use for camouflaging, courting mates or startling predators. One dynamic pattern, where thick black and white bands flow rapidly over the skin of the cuttlefish as it near its prey, is somewhat of a mystery. Why, just as the cuttlefish approaches an unsuspecting target, should it switch from camouflage to a highly conspicuous display?
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The BA (British Association for the Advancement of Science) is a nation-wide organisation dedicated to connecting science with people and promoting openness about science in society. It organises Science Week (11-20 March 2005) and an annual Festival of Science, which was hosted this year by the University of Exeter. Mathematics was well represented at this year’s Festival, with an exhibition of mathematical art, the launch of the National Cypher Challenge, and a morning of fascinating lectures on the Clay Institute Millennium Problems. The three ‘Million Dollar Maths’ problems covered were P vs. NP, the Riemann Hypothesis, and the Poincaré Conjecture.
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This article has been reprinted in the February 2005 issue of Mathematics Today (vol.47, no.1), the magazine of The Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications (IMA). Download pdf
The sleek animal glides effortlessly above the ground. The skin of her bullet-shaped body can smoothly change colour and pattern to match the surroundings, providing an almost perfect camouflage. The animal is on the hunt, and scans ahead with her acute vision. She spies her prey in the murky distance and banks gently towards it. As she approaches, the hunter slows and then hovers, the skirt-like fin along her flanks rippling gently to provide lift. The design on her back morphs into an all-together different pattern, this one a vivid, dynamic display. The whole animal appears to be pulsating as thick black and white stripes race across her surface, from the base of her body to the tip of her tentacles. The predator carefully edges nearer to its quarry and then suddenly jets forward, her tentacles exploding outwards to envelop the hapless prey in their clutches. It is quickly dragged in towards the beak, which crushes through the prey’s exoskeleton and gulps down its flesh. After this burst of ferocity the hunter switches back into perfect camouflage, and slips away unseen.