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A handout photo made available by Nasa shows a recovery fastboat alongside the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule following its splashdown off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, US. Photograph: Nasa handout/EPA

SpaceX mission: Nasa astronauts splash down aboard Crew Dragon capsule

Pair who took first commercial trip to orbit land in Gulf of Mexico off Florida

Celebrating the bicentenary of John Tyndall, one of Ireland’s most influential scientists

Like John Tyndall, who always underlined the need for science communication and engagement with the public, Tyndall National Institute in UCC has a major programme of science engagement in tandem with advanced research. Above public engagement and outreach officers Dr Caitriona Tyndall and Alida Zauers with Albi Morrish in the Tyndall Atrium adjoining the cleanroom during Culture Night. Photograph: Clare Keogh.

Kevin O'Sullivan

Carlow man reached the pinnacle of 19th century science but full recognition eluded him

Nasa craft blasts off to search for ancient life on Mars

This Nasa video TV grab image show the Nasa rover Perseverance after lift off after the first burn as it launches for Mars on Thursday. Photograph: Getty Images

Perseverance due to land at base of former lake from 3.5 billion years ago

‘I’m hoping the pandemic will make it easier to slow down’

English social geographer Danny Dorling says we are already experiencing a slowdown in terms of population, fertility and even GDP. Photograph: Simone Padovani/ Awakening/Getty Images

Sylvia Thompson

Oxford professor Danny Dorling on why deceleration is good for the planet, the economy and our lives

Stimulating long-term memory T cells to fight coronavirus

Covid-19 spike protein linking attached to a human cell. photograph: Nexu Science Communication

Claire O'Connell

T-cells could potentially be used to achieve more sustained immunity against the disease

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

Tony McGrath (76) cocooning at his home in Drumcondra, Dublin. Photograph: Fran Veale

Blanket cocooning for over-70s has done more harm than good

William Reville

Telling healthy older people to lock themselves away has been counterproductive

Albrecht Dürer was born in Nuremberg in 1471 and produced art of outstanding quality

Sketches and spirals: When maths and art collide

Peter Lynch

Albrecht Dürer, born in 1471, believed ‘the new art must be based upon science’

Monarch butterflies make Herculean migratory trips each autumn, travelling more than 3,500km from eastern Canada and the northeastern US to Mexico.

New evidence emerges on decline of monarch butterflies

William Reville

Dramatic fall in monarch numbers has been widely blamed on Roundup weedkiller

Peter Casey’s Theorem greatly generalised Ptolemy’s Theorem. Figure: Dr Maurice O’Reilly, DCU

In tribute to John Casey, founder of modern geometry

Peter Lynch

Limerick academic extended Greek astronomer Ptolemy’s theorem and wrote six widely used textbooks

Coronaviruses are zoonotic, ie can transfer to people from animals. It is thought SARS-COV-2 that causes Covid-19 originated in bats. Photograph: Getty Images

Viruses hijack living host cells, and then replicate themselves

William Reville

William Reville: Antibiotics do not work against coronavirus because they are designed to fight bacteria

Since the population is finite, and the vast majority of people recover, the graph of the number of infected people is bell-shaped, growing to a maximum and then declining

Coronavirus: What does exponential growth mean?

Peter Lynch

Disease grew exponentially in its initial stages but that cannot continue indefinitely

Riot Games’s most popular video game, League of Legends

The mathematics of fair play in video games

Peter Lynch

A rating system originally developed for chess is used to match evenly-skilled players

Air traffic controllers have a very high cognitive ability called situational awareness. File photograph: Alan Betson

William Reville: There are no shortcuts to high achievement

William Reville

You can only become a critical thinker in areas where you have deep knowledge

A National Health Service ‘catch it, bin it, kill it’ sign on TV screens in the entrance in London. Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA Wire

Coronavirus: Modelling the evolution of a viral outbreak

Peter Lynch

Mathematical models were useful in responding to Sars, Ebola and swine flu and will help with the Covid-19 virus too

The body must work to maintain the multitasking brain we developed over long evolutionary time and if the brain is not actively exercised on an ongoing basis its capacity tends to decline. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill

Aerobic exercise – the route to lifelong brain sharpness

William Reville

Continuous, lifelong exercise is the antidote to gradual decline in cognitive capacity

In his study of hanging, Haughton considered an account in the Odyssey in which Homer described how 12 faithless handmaids of Penelope were hanged.

The Irishman who brought the humane drop to hanging

Peter Lynch

Samuel Haughton discovered a method in which the neck is broken by the drop

Fire and Rescue personal run to move their truck as a bushfire burns next to a major road and homes on the outskirts of the town of Bilpin on December 19th, 2019 in Sydney, Australia. Photograph: David Gray/Getty Images

Australian bush fires were not caused by climate change alone

William Reville

Reducing the fuel load is one immediate step we can take to tackle wild fires

Benford’s law can reveal highly unlikely frequencies of numbers in a dataset. It has been used to detect fraud in elections and tampering with digital images. Photograph: iStock

How many numbers begin with a 1? More than 30 per cent!

Peter Lynch

Physicist Frank Benford’s remarkable discovery has proven valuable in fraud detection

The requirement to limit noise was one of the factors leading to the development of high-bypass turbofan engines to replace older turbojets.

Using maths to reduce aircraft noise

Peter Lynch

Aero acoustics and aircraft design are intensely mathematical in character

Albert Einstein. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

Dead white men: What have they ever done for us?

William Reville

William Reville: We have good reason to be proud of our European heritage

Our Milky Way galaxy is at least 10 billion years old and 1000,000 light years across, contains up to 300 billion stars and more than 10 billion planets with temperate, possibly life-friendly surface conditions. Photograph: Babek Tafreshi/SSPL/Getty Images

Are we alone in the Milky Way galaxy?

William Reville

One possible reason Earth has not been visited by aliens is that we’re a lonely planet with few other inhabitable neighbours in our galaxy

Sir Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin, studying mould cultures at his laboratory in London. Photograph: Peter Purdy/BIPs/Getty Images

Serendipity has played a prominent part in many scientific discoveries

William Reville

Fortunate unplanned discoveries include penicillin, Viagra, x-rays, radioactivity and microwave ovens

A French stamp issued to commemorate the work of Sophie Germain

The ‘extraordinary talent and superior genius’ of Sophie Germain

Peter Lynch

Germain became first woman to win Grand Prize in Mathematics of the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1816

The double helix; the distinguishing chanaracteristic of DNA.

How our bodies pack a metre of DNA into a tiny cell

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: Knot theory helps biochemists understand how enzymes interact with DNA

William Harvey demonstrating the circulation of the blood. Photograph: Getty

How William Harvey taught the world how the heart works

William Reville

Englishman defied popular wisdom with his research of blood circulation system

Traditional burial remains the choice for dealing with the majority of deaths (almost 80 per cent) in Ireland. Photograph: Bryan O’Brien

Pushing up the daisies . . . literally

William Reville

A new, greener, option for disposing of human remains is to turn the corpse into a compost suitable for fertilising garden soil

Cake cutting may sound limited, but it is important for many practical problems. Photograph: iStock/Getty Images

What is the fairest way to cut your Christmas cake?

Peter Lynch

That’s Maths: Scientists continue to try to crack the code of ‘envy-free’ cutting

Columnists

Janan Ganesh

Janan Ganesh -

How Donald Trump acts as a restraining influence on Mike Pompeo

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson -

Newton Emerson: Fading myth of the North’s world-beating schools

Naomi O’Leary

Naomi O’Leary -

Ireland’s Covid travel debate shaped by a peculiar blindness

David McWilliams

David McWilliams -

David McWilliams: How Covid-19 could change Lahinch and Ranelagh for the better

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

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Features & Opinion

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Compelling case exists for an independent network of scientific advisers to advise government on the great challenges we face

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