News by Subject Mathematics

Unlike humans, crops in a field can't move to air conditioning to endure a heat wave. Scientists in Australia are working to understand how heat waves impact wheat.

What stops a species adapting to an ever-wider range of conditions, continuously expanding its geographic range? The biomathematician Jitka Polechová, an Elise Richter Fellow at the University of Vienna, has published a paper in PLoS Biology which explains the formation of species' range margins. The theory shows that just two compound parameters, important for both ecology and evolution of species, are fundamental to the stability of their range: the environmental heterogeneity and the size of the local population.

A team of scientists explained the paradoxical phenomenon of the mutual annihilation of particles and antiparticles in graphene. The theoretical justification for this process was until recently one of the most complex riddles of solid-state physics. This discovery makes the idea of creating graphene lasers relevant.

The Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID) had organized the two conferences from June 7-12 at its seat in Trier, Germany.

An international team of scientists have predicted a new superhard material that can be used in drilling, machine building and other fields. The new tungsten boride they discovered outperforms the widely used 'pobedit' ? a hard tungsten carbide and cobalt composite material with artificial diamond interspersing.

In a fusion of mathematics and earth science, researchers in Japan proposed a novel method for characterizing pore geometry in rock, based on persistence diagram analysis and a newly proposed parameter, the distance parameter H. The method represents heterogeneity and differences in rock type more effectively than the conventional method based on velocity distribution, without requiring costly numerical flow simulations, and the results are relatively stable with small changes in pore space.