Welcome to Visual Math

So, they’re scanning your items at the grocery store, and when the last tomato gets bagged you’re stunned at the cost. How did you spend so much? Maybe those cherries were 12 bucks a pound. Or maybe you should have paid more attention to what you put in the wagon....

Launching a successful start-up these days takes more than a good idea--in the digital age a revolutionary quantitative approach can be just as effective as a solid business plan, if not more so. Take Google --it was hardly the first search engine to come along (remember Lycos...

When science revises its stance, the field itself follows established protocol to adapt, but public opinion can be slow to catch up. Rather than wiping the slate clean, last month's retraction of a key paper proposing a link between childhood vaccines and autism seem only to have widened...

Over the past 20 years educators have fought over the best way to teach numbers to kids. Advocates of traditional math tout the practice of algorithms and teacher-centered learning, whereas reform-math proponents focus on underlying concepts and student inquiry. In the face of continued declining scores in the U.S., these...

Can you put a price on science? The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), signed into law on February 17, 2009--a year ago today--sent some $31 billion to scientific pursuits. [More]

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So far, $9.3 million for researchers building robotic bees, $1.3 million to hunt for viruses that infect single-celled organisms, and $845,000 to study past climate change in Russia has been doled out. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has been able to fund thousands of new research projects with...

A deluge of high-energy physics data is headed toward servers in Geneva, Switzerland, later this month. That's because the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) now says it plans to restart its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) soon for a run that could last as long as two years...

It's halfway through first period, and 10th-grade students at Frances Perkins Academy in Brooklyn are in science class--not in school, but on a specially outfitted bus parked outside. [More]

Anyone who has ever loaded a moving van knows how difficult it is to safely stack boxes of different sizes, weights and levels of fragility, all while minimizing the amount of space those cartons take up. Imagine an endless stream of such boxes and a business that lives and dies...

Dear EarthTalk: I've been following reports about President Obama's stimulus package and what it may mean for creating green jobs. Beyond that, are there programs in place to help businesses switch to greener raw materials and/or to green up operations overall? --Diane, via e-mail

Like a lot of humans, monkeys might not be able to do calculus. But a new study shows that they can learn and rapidly apply abstract mathematical principles. [More]

A team of researchers has successfully factored a 232-digit number into its two composite prime-number factors, but too late to claim a $50,000 prize once attached to the achievement. The number, RSA-768, was part of a cryptography challenge that technically ended in 2007 that had been sponsored by RSA...

Quantum computers can do wondrous things: too bad they do not exist yet. That has not stopped physicists from devising new algorithms for the devices, which can calculate a lot faster than ordinary computers--in fact, exponentially faster, in quite a literal sense. Once quantum computers do become available, the algorithms...

Stereotypes are usually the last thing to change in the face of contradictory evidence. A case in point is the long held belief that boys are better at mathematics than girls.     [More]

The Next 20 Years of Microchips: Pushing Performance Boundaries (preview)

Did you ever sit down to take a test and discover that the person next to you mumbles his way through the whole thing. You probably thought, “What kind of doofus can’t add a few numbers without moving his mouth?” Turns out the answer may be: a very clever doofus....

Polynomials, the meat and potatoes of high-school algebra, are foundational to many aspects of quantitative science. But it would take a particularly enthusiastic math teacher to think of these trusty workhorses as beautiful. [More]

Thieves may leave fingerprints at the scene of a crime. But does an author leave a metaphorical fingerprint on the book? The answer may be yes, according to a study published in the New Journal of Physics .

Swedish physicists investigated how frequently authors use new words in their writing....

Is it true that when we drive, walk or reach for something our brain performs calculations? Is this ability learned or innate? --Helena Larks, San Francisco [More]

How Hard Has the Recession Hit Environmental Activist Groups?

Dear EarthTalk: Is it true that environmental non-profits have been hit hard by the economic downturn, and has this had an impact on their effectiveness? -- Bridget W., Bainbridge Island, WA

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