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Dr Denis Shields, UCD; specialises in working out the make-up of small proteins, or peptides, that enable Covid-19 to attach to its host cell.

Protein discovery at UCD paves way for anti-Covid drugs

Sean Duke

Vaccines offer protection against Covid-19 but drugs still needed to stop the virus

Brain biology points to new treatments for MS and addiction

Prof Keith Murphy of UCD School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science

Claire O'Connell

Research Lives: Prof Keith Murphy, Professor of Neuropharmacology, UCD

Young Scientist: Cork student wins with programme to detect ‘deepfakes’

Gregory Tarr, who was announced as winner of the 57th BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition Gregory. Photograph: Chris Bellew /Fennell Photography

Kevin O'Sullivan

Greg Tarr’s artificial intelligence system detects faked videos faster than current methods

Cork student who designed software to detect ‘deepfake’ videos wins 2021 BTYSTE contest

Overall winner Gregory Tarr (17), a sixth year student from Bandon Grammar School Co Cork pictured with parents Nita and Richard Tarr. Photograph: Chris Bellew /Fennell Photography

Kevin O'Sullivan

Greg Tarr is the overall winner of the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition

Given the space, teens can make significant products – tech entrepreneur Shane Curran

Shane Curran, Evervault. Photograph: Conor McCabe Photography

Kevin O'Sullivan

Everfault founder and BTYSTE 2017 winner building ground-breaking data-privacy interface

We are living at the bottom of an ocean

Peter Lynch

Important questions about atmospheric tides remain unanswered

The River Don threatens to burst its banks on November 8th, 2019, in Barnby Dun, near Doncaster, United Kingdom. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Responding to disaster: Are we getting too soft?

William Reville

The Covid-19 pandemic is undoubtedly serious, but it should not debilitate our resilience

English mathematician John Horton Conwa, who was stricken down by Covid last April. Photograph: Dith Pran/The New York Times

On what day of the week is Christmas? Use the Doomsday Rule

Peter Lynch

John Horton Conway’s ingenious algorithim allows us determine the weekday for any given date

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Chamber at the National Hyperbaric Centre, Dublin. File Photograph: Eric Luke/The Irish Times

Can breathing pure oxygen under pressure reverse ageing?

William Reville

Objective is to fill blood with enough oxygen to repair tissue corroded by advancing years

People who prefer to solve problems by themselves are more likely to invent things. Photograph: iStock

Fostering inventiveness is critical for society

William Reville

Human success depends on our ability to co-operate and organise while technology makes life easier

Christmas tree: When divided up by red, blue and gold kites and darts, no two adjacent regions are the same colour.

Christmas trees and the four-colour theorem

Peter Lynch

Mapmakers and tilers have found how elegant variation can be achieved with care

The satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) has revolutionised mapping and surveying, providing a remarkably high-precision means of specifying locations.

Ireland’s mapping grid in harmony with GPS

Peter Lynch

A new grid was established about 20 years ago and has become the standard

Demonising scientists who have evidence-based criticisms of the “scientific consensus” in the field of climate change is an insult to the subject and promotes scientism. Photograph: Reuters

Science must not marginalise the humanities

William Reville

Science is acutely aware of its limits but scientism is dogmatic

Adolf Hitler and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler (left) observe a parade of Nazi stormtroopers in 1940. Photograph: Reuters/Corbis

Is it acceptable to use data from Nazi medical experiments?

William Reville

Unethical Nazi experiments yielded scientifically valid results in some cases

As soon as observations are available, computer predictions are subjected to rigorous verification procedures.

Talking about the weather: Forecasting gets better and better

Peter Lynch

Technology and analysis improve weather prediction by a day per decade

On December 26th, 2004 the 22 Nicobar Islands were hit by waves over 15m high. Entire villages were washed into the sea and 3,449 people were officially reported dead or missing. Photograph: Reuters/Punit Paranjpe

Was the aid worse than the tsunami?

William Reville

Many Nicobarese regret leaving their homes following the 2004 disaster and now suffer from depression and alcoholism

Terry Tao. Photograph: Graeme Mitchell/The New York Times

Maths prodigy Terence Tao does battle with conjecture

Peter Lynch

2020 Hamilton lecture to be delivered via video link from Los Angeles

How is it that the world can be understood mathematically? Einstein addressed it repeatedly, once asking ‘How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought, independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?’ Photograph: AP

Mathematics and the nature of physical reality

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: The universe is profoundly mathematical in nature, and we do not really understand why

The farmers would have viewed their farming culture as superior to that of the hunter-gatherers and would discriminate against hunter-gatherers in the social hierarchy

The farmer and the hunter-gatherer should be friends

William Reville

One of the two groups were treated as inferiors when they blended to form a society about 9,000 years ago, evidence shows

Subjects report that the experience is not dream-like, but feels ‘realer than real’. Photograph: Getty

Near death experience: The phenomenon of the mind ‘leaving’ the body

William Reville

Does it show the existence of life after death or can science explain it?

Years ago, we were confident a computer would never beat a chess grand master; now machines are unbeatable. It’s the same for boardgame Go.

Will mathematicians be replaced by computers?

Peter Lynch

While human intuition and creativity are key elements of logic, they can be replicated

Centibillionaire Mark Zuckerberg. The word ‘centibillionaire’ has entered into common usage for someone with a net worth of more than $100 billion. Photograph: Charles Platiau/Reuters

Better names needed for large numbers

Peter Lynch

The word ‘centibillionaire’ is a linguistic travesty

Galileo Galilei’s signature is seen on a document displayed during the exhibition “Lux in Arcana, the Vatican secret Archives reveals itself” at the Capitoline Museums in Rome in 2012. Photograph: Tony Gentile/Reuters

How cooler heads could have avoided the ‘Galileo affair’

William Reville

Conventional account ignores gaps in scientist’s evidence to Catholic Church inquisition

Plaque with the Drake Equation, at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, in West Virginia, US.

Is there anyone out there? Drake’s Equation gives a clue

Peter Lynch

Life beyond our berth in space is a matter of conjecture . . . perhaps even a numbers game

A 17th century representation of the world system of Copernicus), father of modern astronomy. Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Mansell/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Great human advances were made throughout the ‘Dark Ages’

William Reville

The major discoveries of the Scientific Revolution were made in universities strongly supported by the church

Pavlov sounded a metronome as he gave a dog food. After a while the dog salivated on hearing the metronome, even when no food was present. Photograph: Nick Vedros/Image Bank

How Pavlov’s doggedness led to a breakthrough in psychology

William Reville

Discovery of conditioned reflex played large role in development of behaviourism

In a two-child family, given that there is at least one boy, what is the probability that there are two?

We have been intrigued by infinity’s enigma for . . . forever

Peter Lynch

Resolution of paradox: A gateway to mathematical progress

Schematic of the central region of a black hole showing infalling material (yellow) and a powerful jet of outflowing material (white). From Chandra X-Ray Observatory, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The world on a string – a primer

William Reville

String theory is beautifully explained by Brian Greene in The Elegant Universe

Hungarian Cornelius Lanczos took up a position at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.

Cornelius Lanczos: Inspired by Hamilton’s quaternions

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: Influential Hungarian took up position in Dias in 1954

Are ‘designer babies’ something we really want?

William Reville

Ability to alter genetics of embyros remains limited but progress will bring big questions

How can we understand such enormous quantities? Popular descriptions often involve counting the grains of sand on a beach. Some mathematicians refer to the number of litres of water flowing over the Niagara Falls, or the raindrops falling to earth every year.

It all adds up: the ever-growing goals of googology

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: The search for ever-larger numbers has been given the evocative name googology

Life expectancy is growing fastest in emerging markets where the number of people aged 60 years and over is double that in the developed world. Photograph: PA Wire

Are societies really ageing?

William Reville

In advanced economies today 75-year-olds have the same mortality rates as 65-year-olds in 1950

Thanks to a mathematical technique called principal component analysis, this can be done with remarkable accuracy

The geography of Europe is mapped in our genes

Peter Lynch

In the age of ‘big data’ voluminous data collections are mined for information

Thousands of people marched in anti-government protests in Budapest in 2018 over limits on academic freedom under Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s nationalist government. Photograph: Marko Drobnjakovic/AP.

Academic freedom is under pressure in Irish universities

William Reville

Academic freedom thrives on diversity and encouraging contrasting ideas

Prof Philip Nolan, who is president of Maynooth University, is the chairman The Irish Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group. Photograph: Tom Honan

Why pooling expertise to tackle Covid-19 works

Peter Lynch

The modelling work is a wonderful example of blending the techniques of applied mathematics and statistics

Columnists

David McWilliams

David McWilliams -

David McWilliams: What a Doc Martens boot can teach us about the wealth gap

Diarmaid Ferriter

Diarmaid Ferriter -

Diarmaid Ferriter: Efforts to avoid ‘public scandal’ created the greatest scandal of all

Juliana Adelman

Juliana Adelman -

The science of the calorie

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson -

Newton Emerson: SF, DUP refuse to concede their atavistic nationalism a huge strategic error

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

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Features & Opinion

The science of the calorie

The measure of heat energy was not translated to food until the end of the 19th century

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