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Mariners have long spoken of 'walls of water' appearing from nowhere in the open seas. But oceanographers have generally disregarded such stories and 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.

A mathematical problem underlying fundamental questions in particle physics and quantum physics is provably unsolvable, according to scientists at UCL, Universidad Complutense de Madrid - ICMAT and Technische Universität München. The findings show that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.

A mathematical problem underlying fundamental questions in particle and quantum physics is provably unsolvable, according to scientists at UCL, Universidad Complutense de Madrid - ICMAT and Technical University of Munich. It is the first major problem in physics for which such a fundamental limitation could be proven.

Swarming locusts interact with at least two of their neighbours when aligning themselves in order to march in the same direction, says new research led by Bath mathematicians. During swarming, locusts tend to move in the same direction as their neighbours, but then spontaneously switch direction together as a group, a behaviour also seen in other animal groups such as starlings and fish.

A Stanford-led team shows how these ancient creatures' undulating motions cause water to pull them along. This counterintuitive insight could spur new designs for energy-efficient underwater craft. By Tom Abate Video of a lamprey (black outline) swimming in a water tank. Colors indicate low-pressure suction forces (blue) and high-pressure pushing forces (red) generated by the animal as it swims.

Academics from the University of Bristol will present new breakthroughs on two fundamental problems in Computer Science. These results will be presented at the world's leading international conference in computer science this week. The 56th annual IEEE symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2015) will take place in California from 18-20 October.

More rain leads to fewer trees in the African savanna Posted October 19, 2015; 11:30 a.m. by Angela Page for the Princeton Environmental Institute In 2011, satellite images of the African savannas revealed a mystery: these rolling grasslands, with their heavy rainfalls and spells of drought, were home to significantly fewer trees than researchers had expected.

Harbor seals have an amazingly fine-tuned sense for detecting prey, as marine biologists have noted for years. Even when blindfolded, trained seals are able to chase the precise path of an object that swam by 30 seconds earlier. Scientists have suspected that the seal's laser-like tracking ability is due in part to its antennae-like whiskers.

Uncertainty about climate change can, counter-intuitively, produce actionable knowledge and thus should provide an impetus, rather than a hindrance, to addressing climate change, researchers from the University of Bristol's Cabot Institute argue in a special issue of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions A, published this week.

With one of the highest possible awards in the field of applied mathematics the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) has honoured the authors of a paper on computer-supported simulation of flow processes that appeared last year in one of the society's five journals. Among the SIAM publications the Heidelberg paper was chosen as the one with outstanding research results of special overall significance.

Keeping track of time is critical for many tasks, such as playing the piano, swinging a tennis racket, or holding a conversation. Neuroscientists at MIT and Columbia University have now figured out how neurons in one part of the brain measure time intervals and accurately reproduce them. The researchers found the lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP), which plays a role in sensorimotor function, represents elapsed time, as animals measure and then reproduce a time interval.

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) and University of Washington researchers have created an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can solve SAT geometry questions as well as the average American 11th-grade student, a breakthrough in AI research. This system, called GeoS , uses a combination of computer vision to interpret diagrams, natural language processing to read and understand text and a geometric solver to achieve 49 percent accuracy on official SAT test questions.

Starting this September, Ruperto Carola welcomes US mathematician Dr. Rudolph Perkins, recipient of a research grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. During his two-year stay, he will explore the theory of numbers. His host is Dr. Gebhard Böckle, director of a research group at the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR) at Heidelberg University.

A new study conducted by the University of Warwick links being born premature with low wages. Researchers have identified a link between being born preterm and decreased intelligence, reading and in particular mathematical ability and have highlighted an effect on earnings into adulthood.

A team of physicists from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences have demonstrated a new quantum computation scheme in which operations occur without a well-defined order. The researchers led by Philip Walther and Caslav Brukner used this effect to accomplish a task more efficiently than a standard quantum computer.

When a power company wants to build a new wind farm, it generally hires a consultant to make wind speed measurements at the proposed site for eight to 12 months. Those measurements are correlated with historical data and used to assess the site's power-generation capacity. At the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence later this month, MIT researchers will present a new statistical technique that yields better wind-speed predictions than existing techniques do - even when it uses only three months' worth of data.

Simple statistical software designed for electron microscope images can be used to improve pictures of everything from cells to the surface of Mars. The quality of images from digital cameras is affected by variations in their digital light sensors. Variations in sensitivity and even broken pixels in the sensors are a natural consequence of the microscopic scale of their fabrication.

Lancaster researchers have found that a cap masks the scale of violent crime against women in official statistics. Lancaster researchers estimate that violent crime is 60% higher than official figures suggest due to a cap, which means that a person can only be registered as a victim five times. This 60% increase is not evenly distributed, however.

When a new type of drug or therapy is discovered, double-blind randomized controlled trials (DBRCTs) are the gold standard for evaluating them. These trials, which have been used for years, were designed to determine the true efficacy of a treatment free from patient or doctor bias, but they do not factor in the effects that patient behaviors, such as diet and lifestyle choices, can have on the tested treatment.

A team of biologists and a mathematician have identified and characterized a network composed of 94 proteins that work together to regulate fat storage in yeast. "Removal of any one of the proteins results in an increase in cellular fat content, which is analogous to obesity," says study coauthor Bader Al-Anzi, a research scientist at Caltech.