News by Subject Mathematics

New research shows that on social media, like Facebook, privacy can be at risk, even if a person doesn't have an account. Scientists at the University of Vermont demonstrated that a person's identity and actions can be predicted from their friend's posts and writings online.

A recent study has found that a specific gene in cancerous prostate tumors indicates when patients are at high-risk for the cancer to spread, suggesting that targeting this gene can help patients live longer.

Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have discovered spin flips happen in one half of one trillionth of a second, or half a picosecond in the course of a chemical reaction. To understand how fast it is -- watches count in seconds, sporting games are timed in 10ths of a second, and light travels just under 12 inches in one-billionth of a second. Spin flips are faster.

Smoking has long been proven to negatively affect people's overall health in multiple ways. The study shows that the smokers demonstrated a higher aging ratio, and both male and female smokers were predicted to be twice as old as their chronological age as compared to nonsmokers.

Scientists have traditionally thought that DNA binding proteins use patterns in the genome's code of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs to guide them to the right location, with a given protein only binding to a specific sequence of letters. In a new study, published in Cell Systems, scientists at the Gladstone Institutes discovered that proteins must rely on another clue to know where to bind: the DNA's three-dimensional shape.

By combining deep learning algorithms and statistical methods, investigators from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG-CRG) of the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and the Genomics Institute at the University of Tartu have identified, in the genome of Asiatic individuals, the footprint of a new hominid who cross bred with its ancestors tens of thousands of years ago.