Turns out that sheer intelligence is not enough to become a young math whiz. It also takes a good attention span and training your mind to "self regulate" or focus on the task at hand.
The measure for academic success for decades has been a person's intelligence quotient, or IQ. But new research published in the journal Child Development says that a thought process called "executive functioning," which governs the ability to reason and mentally focus, also plays a critical role in learning, especially when it comes to math skills.
DNA testing carried out by University of Leicester geneticists and funded by The Wellcome Trust has thrown new light on the ancestry of one of the USA's most revered figures, the third President, Thomas Jefferson.
Almost 10 years ago, the University of Leicester team, led by Professor Mark Jobling, together with international collaborators, showed that Thomas Jefferson had fathered at least one of the sons of Sally Hemings, a slave of Jefferson's.
The work was done using the Y chromosome, a male-specific part of our DNA that passes down from father to son. Jefferson carried a very unusual Y chromosome type, which helped to strengthen the evidence in the historical paternity case.
Jon Cartwright
PhysicsWebThu, 29 Mar 2007 07:42 UTC
Convinced the balls are always against you when you play the lottery? Then why not bet on radioactive decay in the "quantum lottery", a game invented by a university student in the UK.
Like it or loathe it (and Einstein famously loathed it), quantum processes such as radioactive decay are innately random. But in spite of its weirdness, over the past 80 years physicists have got to grips with the randomness to produce an ever-growing list of proven technology.
None can be so fun, however, as the "quantum lottery", a project devised by final-year physics student Jaspal Jutla at the University of Southampton. The idea is to invite non-scientists from all backgrounds, young and old, to take bets on the decay of a radioactive sample. Jutla hopes this will encourage participants to think about some of the philosophical aspects of quantum mechanics that have emerged over the years. "It's an area of physics that is extremely fascinating and has many unanswered questions," she told Physics Web. "It can also be fun because it urges the participant to use their imagination."
The US has lost its position as the world's primary engine of technology innovation, according to a report by the World Economic Forum.
Andrew Shields
PhysicsWebWed, 28 Mar 2007 08:44 UTC
Technology that exploits the strange rules of quantum mechanics to guarantee the security of encrypted messages is the first product of a new quantum-information industry to reach the market, as Andrew Shields and Zhiliang Yuan explain
As theories go, quantum mechanics has certainly been successful. Despite its many counterintuitive predictions, it has provided an accurate description of the atomic world for more than 80 years. It has also been an essential tool for designing today's computer chips and hard-disk drives, as well as the lasers used in the fibre-optic communications of the Internet. Now, however, the ability to manipulate the quantum states of individual subatomic particles is allowing us to exploit the strange properties of quantum theory much more directly in information technology.
Robert P Crease
PhysicsWebWed, 28 Mar 2007 08:39 UTC
Why is it that particular equations, formulas and expressions become icons, asks Robert P Crease.
When the 14-year-old Richard Feynman first encountered eiπ + 1 = 0, the future physics Nobel laureate wrote in big, bold letters in his diary that it was "the most remarkable formula in math". Stanford University mathematics professor Keith Devlin claims that "like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's equation reaches down into the very depths of existence". Meanwhile Paul Nahin - a retired US electrical engineer - says in his recent book, Dr Euler's Fabulous Formula, that the expression sets "the gold standard for mathematical beauty".
For some people this expression, named after the 18th-century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, even seems to have become an icon, having special significance apart from its mathematical context. It once even served as a piece of evidence in a criminal trial. In August 2003 an eco-terrorist assault on several car dealerships in the Los Angeles area resulted in millions of dollars worth of damage when a building was set alight and over 100 vehicles were destroyed or defaced. The vandalism included graffiti on the cars that read "gas guzzler" and "killer" - and, on one Mitsubishi Montero, eiπ + 1 = 0. Using this as a clue and later as evidence, the FBI arrested William Cottrell, a graduate student in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, who was later tried and convicted. Cottrell testified at his trial that "Everyone should know Euler's theorem".
A space rock the size of three football fields may have slammed into California more than 35 million years ago, according to a team of scientists that includes a high school student.
The proposed impact may have created the giant 3.4-mile-wide (5.5-kilometer-wide) craterlike formation that the team found buried 4,900 to 5,250 feet (1,490 to 1,600 meters) below sea level west of Stockton, California
Rocks in the potential crater date to about 37 to 49 million years ago.
The formation resembles an impact crater, the researchers said, but they are continuing to analyze rocks from oil exploration wells dug in the region for telltale signs of a collision.
Jared Morrow, an assistant professor of geology at San Diego State University, presented preliminary details of the discovery earlier this month at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.
China and the US are the countries most vulnerable to damage from future asteroid impacts, according to preliminary new research. Sweden also ranks surprisingly high in this first attempt at quantifying the risks of impact effects, such as tsunamis, on individual nations.
You're high above the desert peaks. Your aircraft are approaching their targets. Information from instruments, cameras and radar is before your eyes. And with the help of 100 million pixels of bright and vivid virtual reality you're in control of a swarm of U.S. Air Force unmanned aerial vehicles.
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| Muthukkumar Kadavasal, an Iowa State doctoral student in human computer interaction, demonstrates how improvements to Iowa State's C6 provide virtual reality at the world's highest resolution.
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Pasadena, Calif. -- An odd, six-sided, honeycomb-shaped feature circling the entire north pole of Saturn has captured the interest of scientists with NASA's Cassini mission.
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NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft imaged the feature over two decades ago. The fact that it has appeared in Cassini images indicates that it is a long-lived feature. A second hexagon, significantly darker than the brighter historical feature, is also visible in the Cassini pictures. The spacecraft's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer is the first instrument to capture the entire hexagon feature in one image.
