The Nature News Blog reports on a new addition to the non-human numerism literature: Even in death, the world’s most accomplished parrot continues to amaze. The final experiments involving Alex – a grey parrot (Psittacus eithacus) trained to count objects – have just been published. They show that Alex could accurately add together Arabic numerals to…
Geo by Mika Barr for Talents Design
Geo by Mika Barr for Talents Design:
Experimental evidence for Turing’s morphogensis mechanism
Alan Turing’s research in the latter part of his life focused, among other things, on morphogensis – particularly of animal pattern formation. According to a King’s College London press release, Turing “put forward the idea that regular repeating patterns in biological systems are generated by a pair of morphogens that work together as an ‘activator’…
Playing Games With Squares
Katie talks you through some of the interesting mathematical objects that can be made starting from an ordinary square.
Why maths, Dara O’Briain?
Dara O’Briain has written a piece for the Telegraph’s numeracy campaign. Dara, as he explains, has “a deep passion for maths and physics”, having studied mathematical physics at University College, Dublin prior to starting his career in comedy. Dara writes about maths and “cool”. I’m often asked to speak about science, in the vain hope…
Shaping capabilities, but not maths yet
EPSRC has announced the next set of decisions under its controversial “Shaping capabilities” programme. Under this, according to a story in Times Higher Education, the Research Council: has divided its portfolio into 111 subject areas and is mulling over whether to increase, maintain or reduce funding for each of them according to their research excellence…
IBM boasts it is “world’s largest employer of PhD mathematicians”
Steve Mills, senior vice president at IBM recently boasted the company was the world’s largest employer of PhD mathematicians. It is not certain whether this is true but interesting to see them making the boast. According to a story at cio.co.uk, Mills said: if IBM can do analytics for a power grid, it can also…