news

A new study led by the University of Oxford suggests that more insecticide-treated malaria nets (ITNs) and improved efficiency in net delivery are needed to achieve universal coverage and make serious headway on the path to the elimination of the disease. Currently, malaria net coverage remains well below the 100% universal coverage target.

Mariners have long spoken of 'walls of water' appearing from nowhere in the open seas. But oceanographers have generally disregarded such stories and suggested that rogue waves - enormous surface waves that have attained a near-mythical status over the centuries - build up gradually and have relatively narrow crests.

A mathematical problem underlying fundamental questions in particle physics and quantum physics is provably unsolvable, according to scientists at UCL, Universidad Complutense de Madrid - ICMAT and Technische Universität München. The findings show that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.

Swarming locusts interact with at least two of their neighbours when aligning themselves in order to march in the same direction, says new research led by Bath mathematicians. During swarming, locusts tend to move in the same direction as their neighbours, but then spontaneously switch direction together as a group, a behaviour also seen in other animal groups such as starlings and fish.

Academics from the University of Bristol will present new breakthroughs on two fundamental problems in Computer Science. These results will be presented at the world's leading international conference in computer science this week. The 56th annual IEEE symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2015) will take place in California from 18-20 October.

Uncertainty about climate change can, counter-intuitively, produce actionable knowledge and thus should provide an impetus, rather than a hindrance, to addressing climate change, researchers from the University of Bristol's Cabot Institute argue in a special issue of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions A, published this week.

A new study conducted by the University of Warwick links being born premature with low wages. Researchers have identified a link between being born preterm and decreased intelligence, reading and in particular mathematical ability and have highlighted an effect on earnings into adulthood.

Simple statistical software designed for electron microscope images can be used to improve pictures of everything from cells to the surface of Mars. The quality of images from digital cameras is affected by variations in their digital light sensors. Variations in sensitivity and even broken pixels in the sensors are a natural consequence of the microscopic scale of their fabrication.

Lancaster researchers have found that a cap masks the scale of violent crime against women in official statistics. Lancaster researchers estimate that violent crime is 60% higher than official figures suggest due to a cap, which means that a person can only be registered as a victim five times. This 60% increase is not evenly distributed, however.

The University of Nottingham has received £1.2m in funding for two research projects examining ways that teachers can boost maths confidence and numeracy rates in UK secondary schools. Both studies, involving 150 schools, and conducted with Durham University, will provide evidence to help narrow the achievement gap in maths, and pinpoint what hinders some students to learn.

Researchers have captured the first 3D video of a living algal embryo turning itself inside out, from a sphere to a mushroom shape and back again. The results could help unravel the mechanical processes at work during a similar process in animals, which has been called the "most important time in your life." This simple organism may provide ground-breaking information to help us understand similar processes in many different types of animals Stephanie Höhn Researchers from the University of Cambridge have captured the first three-dimensional images of a live embryo turning itself inside out.

New research harnessing fragmentary fossils suggests our genus has come in different shapes and sizes since its origins over two million years ago, and adds weight to the idea that humans began to colonise Eurasia while still small and lightweight. What we're seeing is perhaps the beginning of a unique characteristic of our own species - the origins of diversity.

A Lancaster University academic has been singled out in an international science journal for his far-reaching impact work on ship hatch designs. The weekly journal, Nature , has selected just 12 impact case studies for publication following the recent Research Excellence Framework (REF), a rigorous assessment of research work undertaken by British universities.

The introduction of London's congestion charge led to a substantial reduction in the number of accidents in the city and a significant decline in the rate of accidents per mile driven. That is the central finding of new research by Professor Colin Green from Lancaster University Management School and colleagues, to be presented at the Royal Economic Society's 2015 annual conference later this month.

Professor Norman Fenton writes about his role co-presenting a forthcoming BBC Four documentary on climate change and the importance of three key statistics. I have the pleasure of being one of three presenters of a documentary called Climate Change by Numbers, to be screened on BBC Four on 2 March 2015.

Scientists from Imperial College London have developed a way to make the conclusions drawn from mathematical models more reliable. The work has implications for fields as diverse as medical research and ecology. Models are, by necessity, gross simplifications and, as such, there is always the risk that the model - and so the conclusions we draw - are wrong Most scientists choose to work with one mathematical model and change the input parameters to see what different outcomes result.

An Imperial mathematician has found a new way of formulating a 50 year old algorithm, used when describing the world using mathematical models. It is anticipated that the proposed technique, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), will pave the way for greatly accelerating the calculations involved when making predictions about the behaviour of complex systems in many different areas of science and engineering.

Two UCL professors led a key part of the new analysis of 'Skeleton 1'; which was discovered in a Leicester car park in 2012 on the site of the Grey Friars friary, the last known resting place of King Richard III. They used probability calculations to combine several different lines of evidence, producing an overall weight-of-evidence for the skeleton being that of King Richard III.

The team examined the current growth rate of the epidemic in West Africa alongside airline travel patterns Researchers at the University of Liverpool have found that screening for Ebola at airports could be an effective method for preventing the spread of the disease into the UK and US, but due to the long incubation period of the virus, screening won't detect all cases Published in the Lancet medical journal, the study used a mathematical model to test the probability of infected travellers from West Africa entering the UK and US.

The happiness of over 18,000 people worldwide has been predicted by a mathematical equation developed by researchers at UCL, with results showing that moment-to-moment happiness reflects not just how well things are going, but whether things are going better than expected. The new equation accurately predicts exactly how happy people will say they are from moment to moment based on recent events, such as the rewards they receive and the expectations they have during a decision-making task.