mathematical model

Topic description and stories

Left: Wheat stem rust. Right: Network map of the atmospheric transmission of spores.

Study identifies likely scenarios for global spread of devastating crop disease

25 Sep 2017

New research reveals for the first time the most likely months and routes for the spread of new strains of airborne ‘wheat stem rust’ that may...

Credit: Divulgação Petrobras, ABr - Agência Brasil

Soft solids and the science of cake

24 Feb 2016

Researchers hope that working out the behaviours of soft solids, which can act like either solids or liquids, may make for tastier cakes – and safer...

Modelling how the brain makes complex decisions

04 Feb 2016

Researchers have built the first biologically realistic mathematical model of how the brain plans and learns when faced with a complex decision-...

Ketchup and traffic jams: the maths of soft matter

03 Nov 2015

The class of materials known as soft matter – which includes everything from mayonnaise to molten plastic – is the subject of the inaugural lecture...

Adult Volvox spheroid containing multiple embryos

Upside down and inside out

27 Apr 2015

Researchers have captured the first 3D video of a living algal embryo turning itself inside out, from a sphere to a mushroom shape and back again...

Lassa fever controls need to consider human to human transmission and the role of ‘super spreaders’, say researchers

15 Jan 2015

One in five cases of Lassa fever – a disease that kills around 5,000 people a year in West Africa – could be due to human-to-human transmission, with...

Overlaid waveforms of the flagellar beating of two somatic cells of Volvox carteri held on separate glass micropipettes.

Microscopic rowing – without a cox

29 Jul 2014

New research shows that the whip-like appendages on many types of cells are able to synchronise their movements solely through interactions with the...