Article
Understanding life with topology
Can topological data analysis create a revolution in the life sciences?
Content about “ biology
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Article
Black Heroes of Mathematics 2021
This inspiring conference featured speakers from Africa, the US, the Caribbean and the UK. Here are some highlights.
News story
Monkeys play the peanut lottery
A new study suggests that monkeys have a basic grasp of probabilities.
Article
Spontaneous spirals
Simple mathematical rules can make for some interesting psychedelic science.
News story
The maths of Spider-Man
If you want to climb vertical walls you need very large feet — or be as small as a gecko.
Article
Hunting and being hunted
A model of the interaction between predators and prey explains why sometimes frogs appear to eat snakes.
Article
Life's quantum crystal ball
Does the ability to predict the future define the fundamental difference between living and inanimate matter?
News story
Mindless searching
How stupid systems can use clever ways of finding things.
Article
How does your garden grow?
The division of plant cells is governed by their shape – just one example of how maths may reveal the fundamental laws underlying biology.
News story
Biodiversity on the brink
A team of Australian researchers has delivered dire news for polar ecosystems, predicting that in some regions biodiversity may be reduced by as much as a third within decades. It's the result of a tipping point induced by global warming.
News story
Exploring the financial ecosystem
Deciding who is to blame and who should pay for the financial crisis will be a hot topic at the G8 next week. Financial mathematics received a lot of bad press in the aftermath of the crunch and many believe that it was the popularity of mathematical models – often borrowed from physics — that put the financial system at risk. But now models borrowed from biology are helping us understand how this risk might be reduced.
Article
Sex, evolution and parasitic wasps
Some things are so familiar to us that they are simply expected, and we may forget to wonder why they should be that way in the first place. Sex ratios are a good example of this: the number of men and women in the world is roughly equal, but why should this be the case? A simple mathematical argument provides an answer.