A new (easier) way to detect alien life.
Mashable reports on astrobiology research that may have found a simpler (and, importantly, more portable) way to detect traces of life on alien planets … […]
mathematics
Science Art: A four stage sequential game with a foresight bound, Marco Mantovani
This is a game theory diagram from the paper, “Limited backward induction: foresight and behavior in sequential games,” though I found it on Wikimedia Commons. […]
Science Art: Mathematical Knot Table 01, by Rodrigo Argenton
These are knots. Not knots used to tie down boats or headstrong horses, but knots used to explore geometries of space. The display was made […]
Whalesong is structured like a language.
Astrobiology reports on a cross-disciplinary study that has found that the song of humpback whales has the same distinct mathematical structure as a human language: […]
Science Art: 10,000 convex and nonconvex regular polygons, by Arthur Baelde.
This is from the “Posters about Mathematics” section of Wikimedia Commons. The description says: “For a young child, a shape can be called a square […]
Science Art: Ball-shaped blob of California black worms, 2023.
This is a biological photo that is also a mathematical photo. It’s a ball of worms that Georgia Tech researchers were studying, because, as it […]
Science Art: Trojeborg, a stone labyrinth from Visby, 1919
This is an illustration from Nordisk Familjebok, a Norwegian encyclopedia from the turn of the last century. The labyrinth, naturally, is much older. It’s of […]
Science Art: Binary Operations – Multiplication Mod 16, by Inductiveload.
This is a diagram of a times table. As the drawing’s description on Wikimedia Commons reads: Binary ring diagram to illustrate operators on binary numbers. […]
ChatGPT flunks Martin Gardner’s old brainteasers.
If you’re a longtime Scientific American reader, or just a geek of a certain age, you’ll remember Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” puzzle column. (It got […]
Science Art: Magpie on the Gallows, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1568
Oh, a beautiful Renaissance landscape by one of those Lowland masters, a naturalistic scene of people meeting merrily on a wooded path between the village […]
Science Art: Plate VI from Here, a number of broken gifts for the carpenters and lovers…., by Lorenz Stöer, 1567.
I’ve posted illustrations from this remarkable book of geometric studies before. This one looks, to this old gamer’s eyes, like 1D4+1D20+1. (For non-gamers: It’s the […]
Science Art: In s is das Centrum fur den Meridian ANQ, 1857
Click to embiggen As described on Wikimedia Commons (who got this diagram from the British Library), the image was “taken from page 100 of ‘Grundzüge […]
Science Art: From Here, a number of broken gifts for the carpenters and lovers…., by Lorenz Stöer, 1567.
Click to embiggen The title here is the best I could render from the middle German “Hier Inn etliche zerbrochne Gebew, den Schreinern in eingelegter […]
SONG: “Math” (a penitential cover)
SONG: “Math” (a penitential cover) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: This has no scientific source; it’s a penitential cover for being late for March’s song (which I […]
There’s an easy fix for gerrymandering, if Congress can count two decimal places.
In Forbes, Johns Hopkins Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics Steven Salzberg has put forward a modest mathematical proposal to solve some of […]