Get on a commuter train these days and you can virtually see people's brains crunching away at filling the numbers from 1 to 9 into a square grid. As the Sudoku craze shows no sign of slowing, Hardeep Aiden investigates its relatives and predecessors.

A new Europe-wide science magazine

A crisis in cryptography?

The travels of bank notes give important clues to epidemiologists

Is geometry hard-wired into our brain?

The next total eclipse of the Sun will be in March 2006

How to interact with your music collection

Mathematicians may make the "invisibility cloak" more powerful

Learning about the history behind maths helps students understand it better

The GIMPS project finds a new Mersenne prime