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The Ariane 5 rocket carrying the BepiColombo spacecraft lifts off from its launch pad at Kourou in French Guiana in the early hours of Saturday. Photograph: JM Guillon/2018 ESA-CNES-Arianespace via AP.

Europe, Japan send spacecraft on treacherous trip to Mercury

BepiColombo mission to examine closest planet to sun where temperatures pass 400 degrees

Exams encourage idea maths is hard and boring, says top mathematician

Fields Medal winner Prof Martin Hairer at the Royal Irish Academy, Dawson St. Photograph: Tom Honan

Kevin O'Sullivan

Results-oriented teaching adds to perception problem, says Martin Hairer

Irish mathematicians receive Maths Week Ireland Award

Mathematicians Dr Fiacre Ó Cairbre, left, and Prof Anthony O’Farrell, both of Maynooth University, received the Maths Week Ireland 2018 Award for raising public awareness of mathematics. Photograph: John Ohle

Kevin O'Sullivan

O’Farrell and Ó Cairbre of Maynooth University honoured for raising public awareness

Who needs maths? Oh, only animators, builders, nurses, plumbers...

Vital subject: weusemaths.ie shows the links between the curriculum, courses and careers. Photograph: iStock/Getty

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: You’d be surprised how many people use mathematics at work

Superbugs poised to become humanity’s greatest killer

E.coli: the risks of antimicrobial resistance are further complicated by the lack of development of new antibiotics by pharmaceutical companies. Photograph: iStock/Getty

Sylvia Thompson

By 2050, antimicrobial resistance could cause even more deaths than cancer

Life began on Earth early, about 3.4 billion years ago. Photograph: Getty Images

We know Earth is special. So are we alone in the galaxy?

William Reville

The Milky Way is extremely unlikely to contain another technological civilisation

Vital subject: weusemaths.ie shows the links between the curriculum, courses and careers. Photograph: iStock/Getty

Who needs maths? Oh, only animators, builders, nurses, plumbers...

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: You’d be surprised how many people use mathematics at work

The dominant male in a gorilla group services a harem, hogging all the sex with all females in the group and denying the subservient males any “look-in”. Photograph: Alan Betson

Are humans naturally monogamous or polygamous?

William Reville

Balance of evidence indicates we are biologically inclined towards monogamy

The 200th anniversary of the birth of William Rowan Hamilton, in 2005: then minister for state Noel Treacey with TDs Joe Costello and the late Tony Gregory and members of the Cabra Community Centre Project on their way to Broombridge for the unveiling of a plaque.

The many modern uses of quaternions

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: A surprising application is to electric toothbrushes but they have many vital functions

There has been a recent explosion of “predatory” science journals that aggressively solicit research papers from scientists who pay to have the papers published.

The dodgy science of wiping your backside

William Reville

William Reville: Predatory journals can contaminate scientific literature

Tom Lehrer: a comical, musical, mathematical genius

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: Famous for his ballads, Lehrer was also one of the great satirists of his time

The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 paved the way for the development of sophisticated gene-editing techniques. Photograph: Getty Images

Biological elitism: the result of tinkering with human genomes?

William Reville

Despite ethical unease, germ-line modification will surely find mainstream acceptance

You have probably noticed the little rectangles in the camera of your smartphone; this is face detection in action.

Automatic face recognition: how it works

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: We are photographed numerous times every day and have little idea who is collecting the information

A spiral has appeared over the past decade or so on the beach between Booterstown station and the Merrion Gates, southeast of Dublin. A sandbank (pictured) has gradually built up, driven by the action of the sea waves, and has assumed a form close to a logarithmic spiral.

What’s behind the miraculous spiral on Booterstown Strand?

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: Something must have altered to trigger this development

Stem cells are undifferentiated cells that can renew themselves through cell division and, under certain circumstances, can develop into differentiated organ-specific cells. Photograph: Getty Images

How human cells can be reprogrammed to renew our bodies

William Reville

Scientists hope to use pluripotent stem cells to replace organs that have failed

Kelvin’s tide machine. Belfast-born William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) developed the science by constructing the harmonic theory of tides.

That’s Maths: tides are a tug-of-war between Earth, moon and sun

Peter Lynch

Software packages (and apps) now analyse tidal records and use the results to make predictions

Senator David Norris, then Green Party leader Trevor Sargent and Marian Harkin MEP at the GM-free Ireland Network protest rally outside Leinster House, Dublin, in 2006. Photograph: Matt Kavanagh

Are genetically modified organisms safe?

William Reville

Green criticism has undermined public and political confidence in GMOs but science proves they are no riskier than more traditional methods

Ireland recorded 392 suicides last year. Photograph: iStock

Suicide: the best strategies attempting to counter this major problem

William Reville

We have been surprisingly passive in Ireland in responding to issue

Piet Hein: “The Universe may / Be as great as they say / But it wouldn’t be missed / If it didn’t exist”

The Empty Set: this article is about nothing at all

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: Many philosophers regard ‘nothing’ with anxiety, nausea or panic

The first exoplanet transit was detected in 1999 and within 10 years more than 100 exoplanets had been detected. Photograph: Stocktrek RF/Getty

Searching for planets beyond our solar system

William Reville

The discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence would be truly transcending

Measurement of the Lough Foyle baseline in 1828-29.

Trigonometric comfort blankets on the top of mountains

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: angles can be measured very precisely by taking theodolite sightings to distant peaks

The scientist David Goodall (104) at a press conference a day before his assisted suicide in Switzerland, last month. Photograph: Georgios Kefalas/Keystone via AP

Next big debate in Ireland will be about assisted suicide

William Reville

Do you agree that all lucid adults should have the legal right to end their own lives?

The Parthenon: the observer sees the eight columns of the façade as a perfectly regular array, but this is achieved by deliberately introducing subtle distortions.

Optical refinements at the Parthenon

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: This Greek masterpiece is an enduring paean to the power of geometry

The Joyce tower in Sandycove, Co Dublin, from which Stephen Dedalus began his odyssey in ‘Ulysses’.

Leopold Bloom’s arithmetical adventures

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: James Joyce included oblique mathematical references in ‘Ulysses’

Research indicates about 60% of premature deaths can be attributed to unhealthy lifestyles and are therefore preventable.

How to live 10 years longer

William Reville

Five lifestyle practices can dramatically lower mortality rates, research shows

Winton Gallery exhibition’s first World War biplane, surrounded by a stretched canopy of synthetic fabric, curved in the form of the gyrating airflow.

Maths, aesthetics and culture

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: London’s Winton Gallery reveals how numbers shape our world

Other well-regarded studies have reported that drinking one to two units of alcohol a day markedly protects against death from cardiovascular disease. Photograph: Johnny Green/PA Wire

First drinking ‘protects your heart’. Then it ‘shortens your life’. Who to believe?

William Reville

Health researchers should tread carefully to avoid the alcohol-guidelines morass

Prof Richard Dawkins and physicist Stephen Hawking are dismissive of philosophy. Photograph: Alan Betson

The power and the limits of science

William Reville

Science’s success in understanding the natural world motivates some scientists to claim that it is all-powerful and will eventually explain absolutely everything

Ulam played a seminal role in the development of the H-bomb

Stan Ulam, a mathematician who figured how to initiate fusion

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: from the Manhattan Project to the Monte Carlo method

Flight plan: the geodesic arcs – one northerly, one southerly – show the shortest routes between Singapore and Quito. They are shorter than the line of the equator between the two points as Earth is not a perfect sphere

Imagine two cities on the equator. What’s the quickest route between them?

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: Flight planners, astronomers and satnav all rely on geodesics and the effect of Earth’s bulge

Paul Kammerer: Future investigation may conclusively exonerate him which would make a nice end to his story

Paul Kammerer may have been an honest scientist

William Reville

Recent re-examination of his work suggests that he may have discovered epigenetic inheritance, a phenomenon not recognised until long after his death

The Ministers for Health and Children respectively, Simon Harris, TD, and Katherine Zappone, TD, at the launch of ‘A Healthy Weight for Ireland - Obesity Policy and Action Plan 2016-2025’. Pictured with the ministers are Bisi Atelade (11), from St Audoen’s NS and Charlie McCormack (10) Talbot SNS. Photograph: Dave Meehan

Hopes for successful obesity treatment flicker at last

William Reville

‘Quite simply, we have found support for the existence of internal bathroom scales’

Joseph Fourier helped solve many of the equations of physics.

Fourier’s wonderful idea: Breaking complex signals into simple pieces

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: The Fast Fourier Transform dramatically reduced the way computation scales with problem size, making it practicable to solve many problems that could not otherwise be tackled

Italian mathematician Gerolamo Cardano, the founder of probability.

Cubic skulduggery and intrigue

Peter Lynch

16th century battles on the frontier of mathematics

When government is the biggest funder of scientific endeavour

William Reville

The formula for optimum distribution of funding between basic and applied research is not being applied at present

Columnists

Una Mullally

Una Mullally -

Una Mullally: Peter Casey’s views on Travellers are embarrassing

Maureen Dowd

Maureen Dowd -

Maureen Dowd: Saudis’ medieval barbarity is enabled by US Faustian pact

David McWilliams

David McWilliams -

David McWilliams: Under the bonnet of Trump’s purring economic engine

Cliff Taylor

Cliff Taylor -

Cliff Taylor: Is there any way now to avoid a no-deal Brexit?

Citizen Science The Irish Times and citizen science researchers have teamed up. See the results here

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Features & Opinion

Why Galileo is in the ‘news’ again

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