Scientific American - Math

How to Make Science and Tech Jobs More Enticing to Undergrads

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:59:00 EST

The number of U.S. undergraduate degrees being awarded in most STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math) has risen steadily in recent years{link to G Sci page}. Yet some American employers say they are having trouble finding candidates to fill STEM jobs. The mismatch is not occurring because of an actual shortage of graduates; the numbers of job openings and new degree holders align fairly closely. And the shortfall is not because more foreign-born students are returning home after earning U.S. degrees, as has been rumored lately.

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The Not-So-Hot Hand

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

Reggie Miller, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant. They’ve all gone on seemingly memorable shooting streaks. But past research has shown that the so-called hot hand is a myth, rooted in our tendency to see patterns where there are none.

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Are Physical Constants Really Constant?

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST

Some things never change. physicists call them the constants of nature. Such quantities as the velocity of light, c , Newton’s constant of gravitation, G , and the mass of the electron, m e , are assumed to be the same at all places and times in the universe. They form the scaffolding around which the theories of physics are erected, and they define the fabric of our universe. Physics has progressed by making ever more accurate measurements of their values.

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A Brief History of Clocks

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST

Humankind’s efforts to tell time have helped drive the evolution of our technology and science throughout history. The need to gauge the divisions of the day and night led the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to create sundials, water clocks and other early chronometric tools. Western Europeans adopted these technologies, but by the 13th century, demand for a dependable timekeeping instrument led medieval artisans to invent the mechanical clock. Although this new device satisfied the requirements of monastic and urban communities, it was too inaccurate and unreliable for scientific application until the pendulum was employed to govern its operation. The precision timekeepers that were subsequently developed resolved the critical problem of finding a ship’s position at sea and went on to play key roles in the industrial revolution and the advance of Western civilization.

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Stephen Hawking, "Equal to Anything!" [Excerpt]

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:15:00 EST

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from the chapter "Equal to Anything!" from the new book Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), by Kitty Ferguson . [More]

Gingrich Tops Scientific American 's Geek Guide to the 2012 GOP Candidates

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 05:00:00 EST

The contenders for the Republican nomination in the 2012 U.S. presidential election may appear to be a fairly uniform group of middle-aged white conservatives, but when it comes to issues of science, technology and overall geek cred, none of these candidates is cut from the same cloth. In fact, Newt Gingrich nudges out Mitt Romney and Ron Paul in Scientific American 's overall ranking, based on the former Congressman's engagement in issues related to energy, the Internet and military weapons, combined with his mastery of top online tools such as Twitter and a healthy appetite for science nonfiction.

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The Math behind Screening Tests

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 10:00:00 EST

It seems like every few months a new study points out the inefficacy of yet another wide-scale cancer screening. In 2009 the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force suggested that many women undergo mammograms later and less frequently than had been recommended before because there seems to be little, if any, extra benefit from annual tests. This same group recently issued an even more pointed statement about the prostate-specific antigen test for prostate cancer: it blights many lives but overall doesn’t save them.

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Anything Boys Can Do...

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 08:00:00 EST

When then Harvard University president Lawrence Summers suggested in 2005 that innate differences between men and women may account for the lack of women in top science and engineering positions (and subsequently resigned), he was referring to the greater male variability hypothesis. Women, it holds, are on average as mathematically competent as men, but there is a greater innate spread in math ability among men. In other words, a higher proportion of men stumble mathematically, but an equally high proportion excel because of something in the way male brains develop. This supposedly explained why boys tend to dominate math competitions and why men far outnumber women in elite university math departments. Since then, scientists have put the variability hypothesis to the test, and it comes up short.

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Pigeons Can Follow Abstract Number-Counting Rules

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:57:08 EST

Several vertebrate species can distinguish between, say, two and five bananas--but with the exception of primates, they can’t grasp the numerical rules that would let them arrange their piles of fruit from least to most. Now, new research suggests that pigeons, like primates, can follow these abstract numerical rules. The study is in the journal Science . [Damian Scarf, Harlene Hayne and Michael Colombo, " Pigeons on Par with Primates in Numerical Competence "]

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Tantalizing Hints of Elusive Higgs Particle Announced [Update]

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:08:00 EST

GENEVA--The two largest collaborations of physicists in history Tuesday presented intriguing but tentative clues to the existence of the Higgs boson , the elementary particle thought to endow ordinary matter with mass.

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Has the Higgs Been Discovered? Physicists Gear Up for Watershed Announcement

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:18:00 EST

The physics buzz reached a frenzy in the past few days over the announcement that the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva is planning to release what is widely expected to be tantalizing--although not conclusive--evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, the elementary particle hypothesized to be the origin of the mass of all matter.

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Hoopsters Believe In Hot-or-Not Hand

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 12:36:08 EST

“Three seconds to shoot. It’s Reggie! And it’s Indiana by eight!” Reggie Miller, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant. They’ve all gone on seemingly memorable shooting streaks. But past research has shown that the so-called "hot hand" is a myth, rooted in our tendency to see patterns where there are none.

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Human Genome Untangled in 3-D [Video]

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 15:05:00 EST

Erez Lieberman Aiden was an undergraduate at Princeton University in 2000 when scientists announced with great fanfare that they had sequenced the first human genome , yielding a trove of information about what happens inside every human cell. But Aiden wondered what it would be like to see what was happening inside a human cell. How does this gigantic genome--which would stretch 2 meters if you unwound it from its 5-micron-wide coil in the nucleus--actually go about its work?

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Physicists Dive into Oscillation Frequency of Coffee

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 08:30:00 EST

At a recent math conference, Rouslan Krechetnikov watched his colleagues gingerly carry cups of coffee . Why, he wondered, did the coffee sometimes spill and sometimes not? A research project was born.

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What Is Life Like in Other Parts of the Multiverse? [Video]

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 18:10:00 EST

This year has been a painful one for fans of the NFL's Indianapolis Colts, the perennial contender that has fallen to 0–10 on the season . Perhaps Hoosiers can take some small comfort in the thought of a world where star quarterback Peyton Manning is healthy rather than hobbled and the Colts are undefeated rather than winless. If the cosmological concept of the multiverse is correct , such a world could exist right now.

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How Ideas Emerge from Society

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:00:00 EST

Where do great ideas come from--and how do we recognize their significance when they appear?

Danny Hillis, Applied Minds co-founder and a Scientific American adviser, and I were discussing these questions recently as we prepared for a talk in late October at the Compass Summit (compass-summit.com). “Ideas are a product of society,” an emergent phenomenon, Hillis told me, “which are almost inevitable.” That’s why, he said, our admiration for individuals who have come up with such ideas is “almost giving too much credit.” The idea itself is not enough. A lot of people in a society will have a given notion, he explained. Maybe only 1,000 will try to sketch it out. “Then 100 will try to make something, and 10 of those might actually make something practical. One or two of those might be on the level of an Edison or Tesla.”

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Bigger Plates, More Food--Or Is It the Other Way Around?

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 08:00:00 EST

A recent study by researchers at the University of Utah suggested that the amount of food diners in a restaurant consumed was influenced by fork size. I haven’t seen details of the study, but it does remind me that people can draw diametrically opposite conclusions from the same raw data by altering definitions ever so slightly.

If only such contradictory results were contrived and isolated phenomena, but they’re not. When dealing with weakly correlated quantities, we often can come up with spurious trends and associations by artfully defining the size of the categories we use. This has been done recently in studies of violent crime to show that certain categories of crime were changing in the desired direction, and I intend to illustrate the point here with a similar story.

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Recommended: Relics: Travels in Nature's Time Machine

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 08:00:00 EST

Relics: Travels in Nature’s Time Machine by Piotr Naskrecki. University of Chicago Press, 2011

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Arithmetic Progression: U.S. Education Assessment Shows Modest but Steady Gains in Math Scores

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:45:00 EST

New data from a national math test show that U.S. fourth- and eighth-graders have made slight gains since 2009, but only 35 to 40 percent of the students tested showed proficiency in math. [More]

Low Taxes, High Rhetoric: What Consumers Really Do with Their Tax Cuts

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 08:30:00 EST

The Republican-Democratic debate over income tax rates and the size of government has been long on rhetoric but short on data. What does published research say about what different economic groups do with savings from income-tax cuts? Will the economy slow if Washington cancels tax cuts on millionaires and billionaires?

Most experts agree that tax cuts can stimulate a weak economy over the short term through increased consumption and investment, provided the money flows to people who are more likely to spend than save. Past observation has shown that because lower-income people often live paycheck to paycheck, they are more likely than the wealthy to spend. Yet “our research suggests that hasn’t been true for the past decade,” says economist Joel Slemrod of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Because the last few tax cuts have followed financial crises, poorer people may have used the extra income to increase their cushion by building up assets or paying down debt. But the rich haven’t been spending freely either. Last year a study by Moody’s Analytics suggested that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts spurred the wealthy to significantly increase their savings as well.

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