Researchers from the University of Oslo have created reconstructions of what newborn babies can see.
For the first time ever, scientists have combined knowledge of the visual perception of newborns with Mathematical projections about how far away stimuli can be in order to remain in an infant’s field of vision.
The research indicates that an infant can see up to 30cm away; beyond this, images become almost indistinguishable. An approaching face at any distance larger than 30cm will not be recognised by a baby at all, for example. It is this key motion of ‘approaching’ that the researchers in Oslo have pursued; prior research into infants’ visual fields had involved trying to assemble images that infants could perceive based on different depths of field, but all of the images were still photographs. This new research, however, made use of moving faces and bodies. “The real world is dynamic,” said Professor Svein Magnussen, one of the lead researchers. “Our idea was to use images in motion”.
While this research only indicates that babies are aware of images up to 30cm away, and does not tell us how their brains process this information, it is promising for Psychology researchers investigating how and why infants imitate facial expressions at such a young age. It has long been a debate whether indeed infants do imitate their parent’s facial expressions in the first few months of life, or if this is simply a widespread myth repeated by parenting guides.
Biological Natural Sciences applicants interested in child development should investigate which factors influence the development of eyes in the uterus, to understand the physical developments which occur prior to exposure to a larger wealth of visual stimuli outside of the womb.
A recently published statistical analysis has argued that alients, if they exist, will be the size of bears.
Fergus Simpson, of the University of Barcelona, has used Bayes’ theorem and Bayesian statistics to argue that, based on estimated population sizes and distributions, an alien would have a median weight of 692lbs, or 314kg. As Biological Natural Scientists will know, body size on Earth roughly inversely correlates with the frequency of a species. Finding a mosquito is more likely than finding a blue whale, for example.
Simpson used this idea to posit that the median weight of a widely distributed alien species would be 692lbs, and aliens were likely to live on planets with a radius of 1.4 times that of Earth or less. This assumption was based on Earth’s ability to retain an atmosphere and water, and the ease of sustaining life at larger sizes.
While Simpson’s analysis gives us a good indicator as to what an alien could look like, Mathematicians and Staticians have found flaws in his arguments. Simpson’s argument was based on an assumption of civilizations of less than 50 million people, but there are no reasons to believe this to be true. It is also possible that humans are the median of all civilizations, and so rather than using humans as a ‘lower bound’ from which to gauge intelligent life might be incorrect.
A researcher at the STEI Institute has also argued that anything that large is likely to be in the water. Earth Sciences applicants should consider the connection between bodies of water and the biodiversity of creatures there to assess the validity of this claim.
Researchers at the United States Geological Survey have detected gold, silver, and other precious metals in human waste.
As Chemistry applicants will know, finding trace amount of elements is not in itself a significant discovery, but the amount discovered in human waste matches that of the levels in a mineral deposit – a level which would be profitable enough for traditional mining.
Dr. Kathleen Smith, the lead researcher, says that metals are plentiful in sewer drains, found in grooming products and deodorant and other chemical compositions, which collectivise and crop up in wastewater treatment plants. Discovering ways to utilise waste products wil decrease the need for mining, and reduce metals unintentionally being released into the environment. Geography students should read further on the environmental impacts of metal ore mining.
The recovery of these metals is performed through leaching, a process of extracting minerals from solid deposits by dissolving them in a liquid in an industrial setting. The study found that 7 million tonnes of biosolids, the name for the composite of human waste and debris from wastewater facilities, comes from the US alone, and being treated in this way will allow the collection of precious metals and the use of treated biosolids as fertilise.
Mathematicians and Economics applicants will be interested to review Dr. Smith’s estimated ‘waste-profit’; she estimates that $13 million could be recovered through the waste of a million Americans alone. Engineering applicants should also consider how innovations such as chemical leaching can be used to improve upon pre-existing engineering solutions to waste disposal.
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A doctoral student at Michigan State University’s High-Performance Computing Centre has created an algorithm to find Wally in the shortest time possible.
Wally, the titular character of the Where’s Wally books created by Martin Handford, is known for being difficult to find among a sea of similarly dressed bystanders. English applicants might be surprised to know that in spite of containing no words, the Where’s Wally books were put on the banned reading list due to ‘controversial content’. Randy Olson, developer of the algorithm, mapped out Wally’s position across all 68 Where’s Wally books, and then plugged the coordinates into a genetic algorithm. This kind of algorithm, of use to Mathematicians particularly, develops solutions akin to natural selection – trialing solutions that differ slightly from the current solution until the algorithm cannot find a better solution no matter which changes it makes.
The path discovered shows the best route for viewers to follow in order to find Wally, taking account of the eye’s natural inclination to view the bottom right corner of pages first. Psychological and Behavioural Sciences applicants should investigate how the eye moves during information processing to form a better understanding of how humans naturally process optical information.
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A dream team of scientists and mathematicians at Arizona State University have applied the tools of mathematics, and various other scientific disciplines, to research bodies of already existing bodies of research in an attempt to predict breakthroughs.
The team studied breakthrough research, following trains of thought back to the original source. They found through this process of ‘meta-analysis‘, pulled together from the research of around 300,000 authors, a few key innovators that could be attributed as the source of major discoveries in their disciplines.
Mathematicians and Engineers should note that the analysis drew on concepts from graph theory, electrical engineering and applied mathematical tools for analysing large networks.
Whilst this research itself is inter-disciplinary, it also points to the fruitfulness of inter-disciplinary collaboration. The researchers noted that major breakthroughs often coincide with the confluence of many areas of research.
There are practical and political implications too. It is hoped that the analysis can be constantly applied to current research and guide funding bodies in their attribution of support. Medicine applicants might like to contemplate the consequences for research in their field, as this could indicate which research areas may have the most potential to grow.
Twisting a strip of paper and joining the ends forms a model for the Möbius strip, a surface with one continuous side. This popular party trick for mathematicians has recently developed a new dimension: physicists have manipulated light to form a Möbius shape.
This amazing result is dependent on a property of light called polarisation, which describes the movement of light’s electric field. By focusing a laser beam through a liquid crystal lens, the light achieves a specific polarisation. Using two such polarised beams and a gold bead smaller than its wavelength, scientists created interference which exhibited the twists characteristic of a Möbius strip.
The practical applications are not immediately clear but it will no doubt spark great discoveries in the future. Mathematicians might like to investigate the geometrical properties of the Möbius strip further, while Physicists might be fascinated by the way in which the discovery elucidates the interaction between light and matter.
The accuracy and detail of weather predictions are soon to be improved when the Met Office unveils their new supercomputer in the latter half of 2015.
The £97 million machine is a long way away from the methods of prediction used in the 1960s, where the forecast was based on observations and deriving analogues and patterns from this information. The premise was that with enough data, forecasters could simply look through the record for a day with a similar atmosphere and assume the weather would take similar turns.
While this worked in some instances, it did not account for small fluctuations in atmosphere that could radically change the weather. The importance of a supercomputer is in our ability to move beyond the forecasts of the past, based on archives of data, and to combine this statistical data with mathematical models that predict the future with the awareness of elements of uncertainty in predictions.
For Mathematics applicants, investigating the equations which meteorologists use to predict weather would be a useful exercise, while Geography applicants would do well to read further on operational meteorology and the practical benefits of good weather prediction.
Mathematical models could hold the key to the future of global food security. This is the news coming out of a recent meeting of mathematicians and crop scientists in Morocco where mathematical models are being developed to identify genetic material that could help improve food crops resilience to climate change. Experts warn that drought, pest and disease are becoming more prevalent than in the past, all of which are expected to worsen with future climate change.
While there are over 1,700 major agricultural genebanks housing over 7 million samples across the world, researchers have so far had the painstaking task of trying to locate the much sought-after traits that would enable the development of climate–proof crops able to withstand heat and drought conditions.
Mathematical models are therefore being developed which would help focus the search and reducing the time taken to locate the precious traits. Rather than employ the use of ‘trial and error’, the model, known as the Figs system, would target samples with a high probability of finding the given traits. A paper published last year presented some of the inroads already made by this new model – where the Figs system successfully identified drought-resistant traits in samples of faba beans. Mathematicians looking for some critical and topical applications of their discipline need look no further, while HSPS, Biological Science and Geography students should harvest all this information before interview time.
Schrödinger’s feline companion may (or may not) be turning in his grave when he hears that two new animals have stamped their name onto world of quantum theory.
The infamous Schrödinger’s Cat refers to a thought experiment created by Edwin Schrödinger in which a cat was put into a box with a radioactive element and a flask of poison. Should the radioactive element decay, then the flask would break, releasing the poison and killing the cat. From inside the box, if the atom does not decay and the cat is not poisoned. Yet from outside of the box, Schrödinger would experience the cat being both dead and alive at the same time. The experiment was designed to illustrate the flaws of the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of quantum mechanics, which states that a particle exists in all states at once until observed.
Now scientists at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France have managed to separate a particle from one of its physical properties for the first time – creating the ‘’quantum Cheshire Cat’’. In a nod to the character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, where the Cheshire Cat gradually vanishes leaving only its grin, researchers have managed to get neutrons to shed their quantum properties, separating them from their magnetic moment – in essence getting the particles to go one way and their spins another way. An outline of the experiment can be found here.
While scientists were still purring at these new findings, an international team of physicists led by Yakir Aharonov have come up with another peculiar scenario which they have called the “quantum-pigeonhole effect“. The paradox begins with the observation that when you put three pigeons in two pigeonholes, there will always be at least two pigeons in the same hole. However, according to the team’s quantum analysis, it is possible for none of the pigeons to share a hole.
According to Jeff Tollaksen, one of the physicists behind the experiment, intuition dictates that if you put three pigeons into two pigeonholes, one hole must contain two pigeons. On a quantum level, however, even basic “counting” becomes peculiar, as “You can put an infinite number of pigeons in two boxes, and no two pigeons will be in the same box. . . It seems to be impossible, but it is a direct consequence of quantum mechanics.” This observation is leading many physicists to re-examine some of the foundational principles of quantum mechanics. While the paradox, like Schrödinger’s, will help physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers develop more accurate theories of quantum correlation and of the relationship between particles and their observer.
At the National Astronomy Meeting in Cardiff, researchers unveiled an astonishing image of the universe – with each galaxy distorted to resemble an elongated banana! The images from the Hubble telescope revealed that the warps were produced thousands of miles away as the light passed through a natural distorting lens in space. This effect was first predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published in 1916. In this case the existence of galaxy clusters in the foreground were responsible for this distortion. According to scientists, we see these distant galaxies as they once were, when the universe was a quarter of its present age. When we correct the distorting effects of the lens, the internal structures are meant to provide us with new archaeological insights into the youth of these galaxies and how our own Milky Way was formed! Exciting times for Maths and Physics applicants.
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