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Machine-learning model provides risk assessment for complex nonlinear systems, including boats and offshore platforms. Seafaring vessels and offshore platforms endure a constant battery of waves and currents. Over decades of operation, these structures can, without warning, meet head-on with a rogue wave, freak storm, or some other extreme event, with potentially damaging consequences.

"What would happen if..'" To answer that question, scientists - whether they're studying climate science or cosmology - rely on computer simulations to bring their abstract data to life in 3D. The process is painstakingly slow, however: One simulation can take up to a million CPU (central processing unit) hours on a supercomputer.

MIT-developed tool improves automated image vectorization, saving digital artists time and effort. Artists may soon have at their disposal a new MIT-developed tool that could help them create digital characters, logos, and other graphics more quickly and easily. Many digital artists rely on image vectorization, a technique that converts a pixel-based image into an image comprising groupings of clearly defined shapes.

String art is a technique for the creation of visual artwork where images emerge from a set of strings that are spanned between pins. Now, at TU Wien (Vienna) this work can be delegated to a robot - an example of a complex task that digital fabrication can solve. The basic idea of string art is simple: hooks distributed on a frame are connected by strings back and forth until they fuse to a perceptible image.

A senior lecturer from the University of Sussex has contributed to a book of brainteasers from BBC Radio 4's Today Programme, which published yesterday. The Today Programme Puzzle Book contains over 280 cryptic, linguistic and numerical brainteasers created by top mathematicians and logicians from around the country, including Dr Nicos Georgiou, Senior Lecturer in Mathematics at Sussex.

), and Matthew Hastings, a researcher at Microsoft, have solved one of the world's most challenging open problems in the field of mathematical physics. The problem, related to the "quantum Hall effect," was first proposed in 1999 as one of 13 significant unsolved problems to be included on a list maintained by Michael Aizenman, a professor of physics and mathematics at Princeton University and the former president of the   was to record some of the most perplexing unsolved puzzles in mathematical physics-a field that uses rigorous mathematical reasoning to address physics questions.

Universities must seek a deeper understanding of the drivers of inequality in job roles and academic ranks if they are to achieve change. Professor Axel Gandy (Chair in Statistics, Imperial College London), Dr Georg Hahn (Senior Research Associate in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Lancaster University) and Professor Nick Jennings (Vice Provost for Research at Imperial College London) have looked at possible inequalities relating to grant application success rates within Imperial over a five-year period.

It's nearly impossible to break a dry spaghetti noodle into only two pieces. A new MIT study shows how and why it can be done. If you happen to have a box of spaghetti in your pantry, try this experiment: Pull out a single spaghetti stick and hold it at both ends. Now bend it until it breaks. How many fragments did you make? If the answer is three or more, pull out another stick and try again.

The location of road accidents is not random and they tend to be highly concentrated in urban areas, according to a new UCL study. The study, published in the open-access journal Plos One , found that nearly 50% of the serious and fatal accidents in London take place in 5% of road junctions. PhD candidate Rafael Prieto Curiel, lead researcher (UCL Mathematics), said: "Despite being a rare event, road accidents are among the top ten causes of death worldwide.

The question of why we sleep has been a longstanding subject of debate, with some theories suggesting that slumber provides respite for the brain, which allows it to filter out insignificant neural connections, build new ones, strengthen memories and even repair itself. However, new Oxford University research has used mathematical approaches to tackle the adaptive significance of sleep, and suggests that it has another equally significant purpose - boosting our 'fitness' and future family line reproductive success.

Have you heard the one about the linguist, astrophysicist, playwright, cancer researcher and screenwriter getting together to vigorously debate the validity of storytelling in science? This is not fiction, but a true story. Hear compelling arguments from both sides, as our expert panel discusses whether storytelling is a friend or foe for researchers.

Somewhere, buried deep inside mountains of information, awaits the human dimension of data. It's the small subset of material that, when properly selected, sheds light on something important, such as public policy or DNA sequencing. This is the scientific territory where Yihong Wu, a Yale assistant professor of statistics and data science, has set up shop.

By Siegfried Hörmann With increasing complexity and the rapidly growing amount of data collected in almost all areas of our life, it becomes more difficult to draw meaningful conclusions and to filter relevant information. The field of statistics has seen a big upsurge due to such new challenges. My research is devoted to some of these challenges.

Around 25 percent of Medicare spending in the U.S. occurs in the last year of people's lives. This is sometimes discussed as a questionable use of resources: Is society throwing large amounts of medical treatment at some patients in a futile, if noble, effort to extend lives that are bound to end soon? A new study co-authored by an MIT health care economist offers a resounding answer: No.

By preserving songs for centuries, American swamp sparrows show a cultural stability previously only seen in humans. Local populations of birds may have sung the same songs for hundreds of years and passed them on through the generations, according to researchers at Imperial College London, Queen Mary University of London and Duke University.

Probabilistic model could provide insights into what makes a human a human A new computational tool will potentially help geneticists to better understand what makes a human a human, or how to differentiate species in general, by providing more detailed comparative information about genome function.

The current data-crunching approach to machine learning misses an essential element of human intelligence Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie Judea Pearl is chancellor's professor of computer science and statistics at UCLA and co-author of " The Book of Why: The Science of Cause and Effect " with Dana Mackenzie, a mathematics writer.

Field trials for a vaccine to protect cattle against bovine tuberculosis (bovine TB) would need to involve 500 herds - potentially as many as 75,000-100,000 cattle - to demonstrate cost effectiveness for farmers, concludes a study published today in the journal eLife . Our results highlight the enormous scale of trials that would be necessary to evaluate BCG alongside continuing testing in the field.

Humans can perform a vast array of mental operations and adjust their behavioral responses based on external instructions and internal beliefs. For example, to tap your feet to a musical beat, your brain has to process the incoming sound and also use your internal knowledge of how the song goes. MIT neuroscientists have now identified a strategy that the brain uses to rapidly select and flexibly perform different mental operations.

A researcher works on a semiconductor tracker barrel for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. CERN The international particle accelerator collaboration CERN announced Monday, June 4, that two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider discovered a link between the two heaviest known particles: the top quark and the Higgs boson.