In a paper recently published in Cortex, Jan Lonnemann (RWTH Aachen University, Germany) and colleagues report that many children at the age of 8-9 years seem to represent numbers spatially. Interestingly, boys using this kind of representation tended to have better calculation abilities, while girls who represent numbers spatially tended to show poorer calculation abilities.

The authors assume that these differences may be due to gender-specific thinking styles: for boys, who may prefer visual-spatial thinking styles, it seems to be helpful to represent numbers spatially when being confronted with calculation problems, whereas for girls preferring verbal thinking styles it may be even detrimental.

Evidence for a connection between number and space processing comes from behavioral, patient, and brain imaging data, but only a few studies have addressed this issue in children.

It's been just over three years since I got married, and I remember thinking (amid the nearly debilitating fear that we would run out of alcohol at our mountain cabin wedding and thus trap our families in a scene from The Shining) that it would be wonderful to finally be free forever from the intrigue and confusion of dating.

You can't fault the optimism.

Now, through the lens of hindsight, I realize that I should have known that dating and even cohabitating were only warm-ups for the big dance.

Example: I didn't really mind the eggshell color of our living room walls——it provided a functional backdrop to both the climbing/skiing pictures taken by a friend in Patagonia, and to the portraits of Italian cafes and riverboats Kristi's father painted, which we hang in place of the climbing photos whenever he visits.

However, to Kristi, the color was "dead guy white." Let me also explain that we have rather complex crown moulding framing the stuccoed ceiling, making painting nearly akin in needed time and expertise to completing a PhD in particle physics. She wanted something "bright and cheerful, like a nice sunshine-pumpkin. Oh and blue trim."

I really had no idea what I wanted other than not to paint the living room sunshine-pumpkin with blue trim. Needless to say:

The connection between music and mathematics has been widely known for centuries. Musica Universalis, "music of the spheres", emerged in the Middle Ages as the idea that the proportions in the movements of the celestial bodies -- the sun, moon and planets -- could be viewed as a form of music, inaudible but perfectly harmonious, and more than 200 years ago Pythagoras discovered that pleasing musical intervals could be described using simple ratios.

Three music professors, Clifton Callender at Florida State University, Ian Quinn at Yale University and Dmitri Tymoczko at Princeton University, have devised a new way of analyzing and categorizing music that takes advantage of the deep, complex mathematics they see enmeshed in its very fabric.

The trio has outlined a method called "geometrical music theory" that translates the language of musical theory into that of contemporary geometry. They take sequences of notes, like chords, rhythms and scales, and categorize them so they can be grouped into "families." They have found a way to assign mathematical structure to these families, so they can then be represented by points in complex geometrical spaces, much the way "x" and "y" coordinates, in the simpler system of high school algebra, correspond to points on a two-dimensional plane.

The risk of illegal information access, notably in money transactions, requires more and more advanced cryptographic techniques against criminals and the occasional mischevious teenager.

Quantum cryptography has been regarded as 100-percent protection against attacks on sensitive data traffic but a research team at Linköping University in Sweden has found a hole in even this advanced technology.

When an encrypted message needs to be sent over a computer network, the most difficult problem is how the key should be transmitted. One way is to literally send it by courier (which has its own security risks) or, if it's in your budget, attached to the wrist of James Bond. But the most common way is a "public key," like https:// for online banking and security functions in Web browsers.

A public key is regarded as secure, since enormous calculations are required to break the long strings of data bits - some 2,000 - that make up the key.

Quantum cryptography is considered absolutely secure but very few people use it. It requires special hardware, such as a type of laser that emits polarized light particles (photons) via optic fiber or through the air and some companies and banks in Austria are testing such a system, and trials are even underway with satellite-TV transmission.

Infinity was invented to account for the possibility that in a never-ending universe, anything can happen. Life on other Earth-like planets, for example, is possible in an infinite universe, but not probable, according to a scientist from the University of East Anglia.

The mathematical model produced by Prof Andrew Watson suggests that the odds of finding new life on other Earth-like planets are low because of the time it has taken for beings such as humans to evolve and the remaining life span of the Earth. Structurally complex and intelligent life evolved late on Earth and this process might be governed by a small number of very difficult evolutionary steps.

Prof Watson, from the School of Environmental Sciences, takes this idea further by looking at the probability of each of these critical steps occurring in relation to the life span of the Earth, giving an improved mathematical model for the evolution of intelligent life.

New Jersey Institute of Technolgy math professor Bruce Bukiet is once again opining on outcomes for this season’s Major League Baseball teams. His picks are based on a mathematical model he developed in 2000.

Bukiet’s main areas of research have involved mathematical modeling of physical phenomena, including detonation waves, healing of wounds, and dynamics of human balance. He has also applied mathematical modeling to sports and gambling, in particular for understanding baseball and cricket. Bukiet is an avid Mets fan but no one should hold that against him.

“I use my mathematical model to determine whether it is worthwhile to wager on games during the baseball season,” he said. “But I also use my system to combat math illiteracy. Baseball can be the world’s best math lesson.”

If identical twins eat and exercise equally, will they have the same body weight? Not really, say NIH investigators Carson Chow and Kevin Hall. They analyzed the fundamental equations of body weight change and found that identical twins with identical lifestyles can have different body weights and different amounts of body fat.

The study uses a branch of mathematics called dynamical systems theory to demonstrate that a class of model equations has an infinite number of body weight solutions, even if the food intake and energy expenditure rates are identical. However, the work also shows that another class of models directly refutes this, predicting that food intake and energy expenditure rates uniquely determine body weight.

Existing data are insufficient to tell which is closer to reality, since both models can make the same predictions for a given alteration of food intake or energy expenditure.

Nearly ten years ago an article published in Science [Lockless SW, Ranganathan R (1999) Science 286:295–299] got a lot of attention. It described a method of demonstrating signal transfer in proteins by comparing their amino acid sequence.

The authors recorded a statistical method of showing how certain parts of proteins change together through evolution, i.e. if a change had taken place in one part a change simultaneously took place in another part of the protein. They found a network of parts that seemed to belong together and, within this network, signal transfer was deemed to take place.

In a new PNAS article, Uppsala researchers present results of experiments they say contradicts that theory.

A new study reviewing 75 group-randomized cancer trials over a five-year stretch shows that fewer than half of those studies used appropriate statistical methods to analyze the results. The review suggests that some trials may have reported that interventions to prevent disease or reduce cancer risks were effective when in fact they might not have been.

More than a third of the trials contained statistical analyses that the reviewers considered inappropriate to assess the effects of an intervention being studied. And 88 percent of those studies reported statistically significant intervention effects that, because of analysis flaws, could be misleading to scientists and policymakers, the review authors say.

For statues, hidden stress and fractures result from standing in place for hundreds of years. Researchers have now developed a way to predict such fracturing, applying the procedure to Michelangelo's David in an analysis that proved simpler, faster and more accurate than previous methods.

In applying the technique to other objects -- including human bones -- the researchers are also gaining new perspective on how these structures are likely to fail.

On March 18, 2008, Vadim Shapiro of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Igor Tsukanov of Florida International University and their colleagues will present their latest results from their Scan and Solve technique at the International Conference on Computational and Experimental Engineering and Sciences in Honolulu, Hawaii.