News by Subject Mathematics

One angle scientists have taken to explore how protein functions arise is to trace family evolution and relatedness, which is difficult. In eLife, Roman Sloutsky of UMass Amherst and his former advisor Kristen Naegle, now at UVA, propose an unusual, new and more accurate way to trace how proteins diverged over time. "It can yield powerful insights into the relationship between protein sequence, structure and function for that family," he says.

In an open-source research paper, a UVA Engineering professor and her former Ph.D. student share a new, more accurate method for modeling evolutionary change.

Greenhouse gases may get more attention, but aerosols -- from car exhaust to volcanic eruptions -- also have a major impact on the Earth's climate. Using a massive NASA dataset, Yale researchers have created a framework that helps explain just how sensitive local temperatures are to aerosols.

MIT engineers have found a way to significantly speed up the planning process required for a robot to adjust its grasp on an object by pushing that object against a stationary surface. Whereas traditional algorithms would require tens of minutes for planning out a sequence of motions, the new team's approach shaves this preplanning process down to less than a second.

Predicting and controlling disease outbreaks would be easier and more reliable with the wider application of mathematical modelling, according to a new study. The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Waterloo, University of Maryland and Yale's School of Public Health.

Consumers have been relying on opinion leader recommendations to make choices about product quality and purchases for a long time. It is even more prominent now with the prevalence of influencers on social media platforms. The problem is, when there is a wide variety of the same product, consumers question if a positive recommendation is based on quality or personal preferences.

Researchers from Aarhus University and Durham University have modelled the fluid dynamics of multi-rotor wind turbines via high-resolution numerical simulations. The simulations demonstrate a clear advantage for a turbine model with four rotors. The researchers found, that the wind turbine wake recovers much faster with multi-rotor turbines, that multi-rotor turbines produce slightly more energy than single-rotor turbines, and that a turbine with four rotors as far apart as possible is the optimal construction.