CSHL Associate Professor Saket Navlakha and former graduate student Cici Zheng have discovered a naturally occurring Voronoi diagram in Chinese money plants’ leaves. Their research answers a longstanding question in biology regarding the mathematics of looping vein structures and could help explain how plants solve complex problems in nature.

A new Rice University study is shedding light on a long-debated question: Can climate variability influence the risk of armed conflict? The answer, researchers say, is yes — but in more nuanced and region-specific ways than previously understood. Led by Rice statistics doctoral student Tyler Bagwell, with climate scientist Sylvia Dee and statistician Frederi Viens, the study uses high-resolution data and empirical modeling to examine how large-scale climate patterns shape the probability of civil conflict and war.

Researchers develop an interpretable hybrid feature selection model to overcome the "curse of dimensionality"in genomic selection, pinpointing key genetic markers for global food security.