news 2017

ANN ARBOR-Even when girls perform just as well as boys on standardized math tests, they are half as likely to major in science at college. However, having one parent or guardian work in the STEM (science, technology, engineering or math) field makes it more likely for girls to perform better in math and to enroll in a "hard sciences" college degree in programs such as engineering, architecture, math and computer science.

An answer to a quantum-physical question provided by the algorithm Melvin has uncovered a hidden link between quantum experiments and the mathematical field of Graph Theory. Researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna found the deep connection between experimental quantum physics and this mathematical theory in the study of Melvin's unusual solutions, which lies beyond human intuition.

Neural networks , which learn to perform computational tasks by analyzing huge sets of training data, have been responsible for the most impressive recent advances in artificial intelligence, including speech-recognition and automatic-translation systems. During training, however, a neural net continually adjusts its internal settings in ways that even its creators can't interpret.

Size matters when it comes to a hospital's operational efficiency and smaller hospitals have a higher risk of inefficiency, a study has found. When deciding on a hospital's optimal size, managers need to consider the clinical functions it will offer, according to researchers from The University of Queensland, Flinders University and Sunshine Coast Hospital and Health Service.

ERC Consolidator Grants for Physicist Stephanie Reich and Computer Scientist Frank Noé No 332/2017 from Nov 28, 2017 Researchers at Freie Universität Berlin have been awarded two prestigious grants from the European Research Council (ERC). Physicist Stephanie Reich and computer scientist Frank Noé won ERC Consolidator Grants, as the ERC announced on Tuesday in Brussels.

SNCF engineers have been using mathematical models for many years to simulate the dynamic behavior of railways. These models have not been able to take into account large portions of the track have been extremely limited at modelling ballast, the gravel layer located under railway tracks. This is why SNCF Innovation & Recherche asked for help from specialists in wave propagation for all types of media and at varied scales: CNRS and INSA Strasbourg 1 researchers.

In the outer atmosphere of the Sun a form of turbulence has been discovered that has always been considered impossible: the turbulence is not caused by colliding waves, but by waves moving into the same direction. With the discovery of this phenomenon - called 'uniturbulence' - a number of KU Leuven mathematicians have earned their place in the physics handbooks for future generations.

New research has shown schooling fish constantly change who they decide to pay attention to and respond to one or two neighbours at a time. The study, published in PLOS Computational Biology, developed a new method combining behavioural analyses with a computer model to map the chain of direct interactions in a school of fish.

No-growth economy could mean fewer crashes and higher wages, study shows An economy based on zero growth could be more stable - experiencing fewer crashes - and bring higher wages, suggests a new University of Sussex study. Running counter to dominant economic thinking, the new research shows that economies can be stable with or without growth and are in fact likely to be less volatile if we stop chasing ever-increasing GDP.

Inspired by how geometry influences physical systems such as soft matter, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have revealed surprising insights into how the physics of molecules within a cell affect how the cell behaves. "Cells have a skeleton just like we have a skeleton," said Nathan Bade, a graduate student in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science , "and, just like our skeleton, it's stiff.

Tiling the plane with a single pattern is a mathematical problem that has interested humans since Antiquity, notably for the aesthetic quality of tiles in mosaics or tiling. One of the unresolved problems in this field that has been puzzling the scientific community since 1918 has now been definitively resolved thanks to Michaël Rao of the Laboratoire d'informatique du parallélisme (CNRS/Inria/ENS de Lyon/Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1).

UCL researchers have devised a mathematical model to understand what causes obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a set of repeated behaviours deriving from an underlying brain dysfunction that is not yet well understood. In the study, published in Neuron , they found that people with OCD develop an internal, accurate sense of how things work but do not use it to guide behaviour.

A new cloaking technology has been developed at TU Wien: a special kind of material is irradiated from above in such a way that another beam of light can pass completely uninhibited. The material is irradiated with a specially designed pattern, the wave from the left can pass through the object completely unperturbed.

Contrary to numbers released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Sept. 12, researchers at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the University of Notre Dame find that poverty has fallen sharply in the U.S. in recent decades. The U.S. Census Bureau's annual income-based poverty report provides data that inform a range of policies and issues affecting Americans from taxes to immigration to trade policy.

Artificial-intelligence research has been transformed by machine-learning systems called neural networks, which learn how to perform tasks by analyzing huge volumes of training data. During training, a neural net continually readjusts thousands of internal parameters until it can reliably perform some task, such as identifying objects in digital images or translating text from one language to another.

Researchers have now succeeded in formulating a mathematical result that provides an exact answer to the question of how chaos actually behaves. The researchers have analysed chaotic states at the atomic level. What does chaos look like in the smallest of worlds that we can imagine - inside atoms' The world in there behaves a lot differently to the world that we experience; the protons and neutrons in the nucleus are waves.

A single change to a century-old statistical standard would dramatically improve the quality of research in many scientific fields, shrinking the number of so-called false positives, according to a commentary published Sept. 1 in Nature Human Behaviour. The argument, co-authored by University of Chicago economist John List, represents the consensus of 72 scholars from institutions throughout the world and disciplines ranging from neurobiology to philosophy.

SLAC and Stanford researchers demonstrate that brain-mimicking 'neural networks' can revolutionize the way astrophysicists analyze their most complex data, including extreme distortions in spacetime that are crucial for our understanding of the universe. Menlo Park, Calif.

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have developed a simple device that mimics complex birdsongs. The device, developed by the group of  L. Mahadevan , the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics, uses air blown through a stretched rubber tube to recreate birdsongs found in nature, including the songs of zebra and Bengalese finches.

Many people over 60 in the UK are victims of sexual violence, according to Durham University research. Despite the pervasive stereotypes of what constitutes a "real rape" - a young woman being attacked by a stranger - the research has uncovered that older people are victims too. The study shows that people over 60 are more likely to be raped by an acquaintance either in their own home or a care home.