News by Subject Mathematics

Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT) researchers studied the nonlinear dynamics responsible for "power hop" instabilities in tractors. They found that bouncing, friction, and joint free-play are all critical factors for modeling this outcome. Understanding how this dynamic instability occurs can help improve industrial safety.

The human world is, increasingly, an urban one -- and that means elevators. Two physicists saw this as an opportunity to explore the factors that determine elevator transport capabilities in their new paper in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics.

Though legislative reform is necessary to combat the growing burden of student loan debt in the U.S. on a grand scale, individual borrowers can take steps to repay their loans with as low long-term costs as possible. A new mathematical model develops a strategy for minimizing the overall cost of repaying student loans.

Scientists from the University of Bristol's Quantum Engineering Technology Labs (QETLabs) have developed an algorithm that provides valuable insights into the physics underlying quantum systems - paving the way for significant advances in quantum computation and sensing, and potentially turning a new page in scientific investigation.

"Job connectivity" (the possibility of finding a similar job) is a key factor for the recovery of local economies in the face of crises, according to a study published recently in Nature Communications by researchers from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Max Planck Society and the University of Pittsburgh.

The now-familiar sight of traditional propeller wind turbines could be replaced in the future with wind farms containing more compact and efficient vertical turbines. New research from Oxford Brookes University has found that the vertical turbine design is far more efficient than traditional turbines in large scale wind farms, and when set in pairs the vertical turbines increase each other's performance by up to 15%.