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The maths sense

You don't need to count to see that five apples are more than three oranges: you can tell just by looking. That's because you were born with a sense for number. But is that sense related to the mathematical abilities you develop later on?
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Interlocking rings

3D printing mathematics

Saul Schleimer and Henry Segerman show off some of their beautiful 3D printed mathematical structures.

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puzzle

The puzzle of time

Why does time only ever move in one direction? We talk to philosophers of physics Jeremy Butterfield and David Wallace, as well as the eminent Roger Penrose about the puzzle time poses to physicists and what it has to do with the Big Bang and the second law of thermodynamics.

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fractal

Do infinities exist in nature?

Is the Universe finite or infinite? Is there infinity inside a black hole? Is space infinitely divisible or is there a shortest length? We talk to philosophers and physicists to find out.
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Dark energy say cheese!

Images are now being taken on the world's most powerful digital camera. For over 500 nights over the next five years the Dark Energy Camera will photograph the light from more than 100,000 galaxies up to 8 billion light-years away in each image.
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The lost mathematicians: Numbers in the (not so) dark ages

A commonly held belief about medieval Europe is that academic pursuits had fallen into a dark age. The majority of scholars were churchmen, and their enquiry often related to some principle of church practice. But is there a value to respecting the tenacity of historic mathematicians?
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Biodiversity on the brink

A team of Australian researchers has delivered dire news for polar ecosystems, predicting that in some regions biodiversity may be reduced by as much as a third within decades. It's the result of a tipping point induced by global warming.
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Caves, drugs and art

Why are drug induced hallucinations so compelling that they apparently provided much of the inspiration for early forms of abstract art? Researchers suggest that the answer hinges on an interplay between the mathematics of pattern formation and a mechanism that generates a sense of value and meaning.
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The problem with infinity

This is the second article in our four-part series exploring quantum electrodynamics. After successfully applying quantum mechanics to the electromagnetic field, physicists faced a problem of boundless proportions: every calculation they made returned infinity as the answer.