news 2018

A senior lecturer from the University of Sussex has contributed to a book of brainteasers from BBC Radio 4's Today Programme, which published yesterday. The Today Programme Puzzle Book contains over 280 cryptic, linguistic and numerical brainteasers created by top mathematicians and logicians from around the country, including Dr Nicos Georgiou, Senior Lecturer in Mathematics at Sussex.

Universities must seek a deeper understanding of the drivers of inequality in job roles and academic ranks if they are to achieve change. Professor Axel Gandy (Chair in Statistics, Imperial College London), Dr Georg Hahn (Senior Research Associate in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Lancaster University) and Professor Nick Jennings (Vice Provost for Research at Imperial College London) have looked at possible inequalities relating to grant application success rates within Imperial over a five-year period.

The location of road accidents is not random and they tend to be highly concentrated in urban areas, according to a new UCL study. The study, published in the open-access journal Plos One , found that nearly 50% of the serious and fatal accidents in London take place in 5% of road junctions. PhD candidate Rafael Prieto Curiel, lead researcher (UCL Mathematics), said: "Despite being a rare event, road accidents are among the top ten causes of death worldwide.

The question of why we sleep has been a longstanding subject of debate, with some theories suggesting that slumber provides respite for the brain, which allows it to filter out insignificant neural connections, build new ones, strengthen memories and even repair itself. However, new Oxford University research has used mathematical approaches to tackle the adaptive significance of sleep, and suggests that it has another equally significant purpose - boosting our 'fitness' and future family line reproductive success.

By preserving songs for centuries, American swamp sparrows show a cultural stability previously only seen in humans. Local populations of birds may have sung the same songs for hundreds of years and passed them on through the generations, according to researchers at Imperial College London, Queen Mary University of London and Duke University.

Field trials for a vaccine to protect cattle against bovine tuberculosis (bovine TB) would need to involve 500 herds - potentially as many as 75,000-100,000 cattle - to demonstrate cost effectiveness for farmers, concludes a study published today in the journal eLife . Our results highlight the enormous scale of trials that would be necessary to evaluate BCG alongside continuing testing in the field.

Using detailed computer simulations, Oxford University research has revealed why falcons dive at their prey using the same steering laws as man-made missiles. Published today in PLOS Computational Biology, researchers from Oxford's Department of Zoology use computer simulations of peregrine falcon attacks to show that the extreme speeds reached during dives from high altitudes enhance the raptors' ability to execute manoeuvres needed to successfully attack agile prey that would otherwise escape.

Using detailed computer simulations, Oxford University research has revealed why falcons dive at their prey using the same steering laws as man-made missiles. Published today in PLOS Computational Biology, researchers from Oxford's Department of Zoology use computer simulations of peregrine falcon attacks to show that the extreme speeds reached during dives from high altitudes enhance the raptors' ability to execute manoeuvres needed to successfully attack agile prey that would otherwise escape.

Scientists at Cern say their NA62 experiment has observed what may be an ultra-rare charged kaon decay. The NA62 experiment is a particle physics experiment at CERN using a 400 GeV proton beam from the SPS (Super Proton Synchrotron) accelerator. The UK has played a leading role in both the detector construction for NA62 and the data analysis and production of results, with Dr Giuseppe Ruggiero from Lancaster University as the Physics Coordinator.

How fast could a new flu epidemic spread? The results of the UK's largest citizen science project of its kind ever attempted, carried out by thousands of volunteers, predict that 43 million people in the UK could be infected in an influenza pandemic, and with up to 886,000 of those infected expected to be fatalities.