News by Subject Mathematics

From love and politics to health and finances, humans can sometimes make decisions that appear irrational, or dictated by an existing bias or belief. But a new study from Columbia University neuroscientists uncovers a surprisingly rational feature of the human brain: a previously held bias can be set aside so that the brain can apply logical, mathematical reasoning to the decision at hand.

A University of Houston researcher reports that 15 years after the end of the Human Genome Project, which mapped the human genetic blueprint, the project is still making news because it forever changed the way scientists work. Among the findings, the literature published by teams of scientists fared better than those published by single authors.

When engineers or designers wanted to test the aerodynamic properties of the newly designed car or an airplane, the procedure usually took hours or even a day. Nobuyuki Umetani and Bernd Bickel have now significantly sped up this process, making streamlines and parameters available in real-time. Their method, which is the first to use machine learning to model flow around continuously editable 3D objects, will be presented at this year's prestigious SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver.

A mathematical model helps explain the key role that one pigment cells plays in making sure that each stripe on a zebrafish ends up exactly where it belongs.