The protein assembles itself into a repeating triangle pattern. The fractal seems to be an accident of evolution, scientists say ..read more

Consider this sequence of numbers: 5, 7, 9. Can you spot the pattern? Here’s another with the same pattern: 15, 19, 23. One more: 232, 235, 238.   “Three equally spaced things,” says Raghu Meka, a computer scientist at UCLA. “That’s probably the simplest pattern you can imagine.”   Yet for almost a century, mathematicians in the field of combinatorics have been puzzling out how to know whether an endless list of numbers contains such a sequence, called an arithmetic progression. In other words, is there a way to be mathematically certain that a set contains a sequence of th ..read more

The “hat” wowed mathematicians. Now the shape is shaking up physics. In 2023, mathematicians reported that the 13-sided tile was the first known “einstein.” That’s a shape that can perfectly cover an infinite plane — no gaps or overlaps — but can do so only without a repeating pattern (SN: 3/24/23). Now, scientists have predicted the properties for a two-dimensional material based on the hat. It’s a quasicrystal, a material that is orderly like a crystal, but in which the arrangements of atoms don’t repeat. Intriguingly, the hat-based material shares properties with graphene, a crystalline mat ..read more

If you take more than 10 percent of the fruit in a stacked produce display — watch out. The iconic sloped produce displays in grocery stores can cause chaos when they collapse. But the question of how much fruit can be removed before the structure comes tumbling down is surprisingly complicated. A new study, published in the December Physical Review E, finally provides an answer. Fruit display collapses are a good system for studying the dynamics that produce avalanches and landslides because they’re relatively simple, says physicist Eduardo Rojas of the University of Antofagasta in Chile (SN ..read more

Science experienced many first-of-a-kind feats this year. These are the groundbreaking achievements that grabbed our attention. Cosmic web shake-up Glowing threads of gas, galaxies and dark matter provided the first tangible evidence that shock waves permeate the cosmic web, the large-scale structure of the universe (SN: 3/25/23, p. 14). Simulations had predicted that colliding threads generate shock waves, which catapult charged particles into the web’s magnetic fields and create a faint glow. That aura appeared in data from radio telescopes, confirming the shock waves exist. The glow also pr ..read more

Is Math Real? Eugenia Cheng Basic Books, $30 Every mathematician has a story that goes something like this. You’re at a party, and someone asks what you do for a living. “I’m a mathematician,” you say. “You must be a genius!” they reply. Or perhaps you end up being an impromptu therapist to someone who needs to vent about traumatic experiences they had in math class decades ago. Mathematics is treated with both reverence and fear: People often see math as an objective, apolitical tool that can buttress or refute arguments, but they also feel intimidated and anxious when they think they might ..read more

Any attempt to better understand Möbius strips is bound to run into some kinks. The twisted loops are so strange that mathematicians have struggled to answer some basic questions about them. For example: “What’s the shortest Möbius strip you can make for a paper band of a given width?”  The question hooked mathematician Richard Evan Schwartz. A mistake in a computer program almost prevented him from finding the answer. Simply messing around with strips of paper finally helped him solve the mystery. A Möbius strip is a mathematical oddity that anyone can make. Cut a strip of paper, twist o ..read more

“Help me and let me help you.” Or in Ghana’s Twi language: “Boa me na me mmoa wo.” The aphorism signifies cooperation and interdependence. And like many Twi expressions, it can be communicated with a symbol, or adinkra. This adinkra has two triangular halves that are almost, but not quite, symmetrical. One triangle has a circle sitting atop it and is missing a square from its interior, while the other triangle has a square attached to it and is missing a circle. Each half completes the other. The symbol intrigues ethno-computing expert Ron Eglash. “There is no math concept in Europe for ‘compl ..read more

There were drones, there were boats. There were spotters on land and a hydrophone listening for suspicious sounds underwater. In what may have been the biggest search of its kind in 50 years, crowds of people gathered this summer in Scotland to hunt for any sign of a legendary creature: the Loch Ness Monster. Nearly 6,000 kilometers away, data scientist Floe Foxon emailed the event’s organizers and wished them good luck. “I’m sure it’s going to be a fun weekend,” he said. Foxon wasn’t joining them, but from his home office in Pittsburgh, he has examined Nessie’s lore in his own way — with stat ..read more

Keeping secrets is hard. Kids know it. Celebrities know it. National security experts know it, too. And it’s about to get even harder. There’s always someone who wants to get at the juicy details we’d rather keep hidden. Yet at every moment, untold volumes of private information are zipping along internet cables and optical fibers. That information’s privacy relies on encryption, a way to mathematically scramble data to prevent any snoops from deciphering it — even with the help of powerful computers. But the mathematical basis of these techniques is under threat from a foe that has, until rec ..read more