The Bridges Conference is an annual event that explores the connections between art and mathematics. Here is a selection of the work being exhibited this year, from a Pi pie which vibrates the number pi onto your hand to delicate paper structures demonstrating number sequences. This year’s conference runs until Sunday in Baltimore. Continue reading...

The most powerful aurora ever recorded has been spotted above a failed star 18 light years away, solving a longstanding astronomical mysteryThe sky above a failed star in a distant constellation shimmers with a beautiful green and yellow aurora one million times brighter than the northern lights. The spectacular light show is the first confirmed aurora on a body outside the solar system, and the most powerful ever recorded.

UK Cabinet Office report sets out risks of coronal mass ejections from the sun causing power outages, and disruption of GPS and communicationsHumanity would only have a 12-hour warning about the arrival of a “coronal mass ejection” that could damage the National Grid, pipelines and railway signals, according to a newly released document from the UK Cabinet Office.

With the immediate excitement of the Pluto flyby behind us, here are the ten most important things we now know about this fascinating worldStuart Clark is the author of The Unknown Universe (Head of Zeus). He is teaching the Guardian Masterclass, How the Universe Works in September. Continue reading...

We want to hear from you, our science readers, about how you want to see the blog network develop in the futureIn 2010, the Guardian launched an experiment: a small network of science blogs written by experts in their respective fields, with a remit to entertain, enrage, and inform. Nearly five years later, and the science blog network has expanded from its original five blogs to fifteen, covering a huge range of topics - from epidemiology, mathematics and physics, to the history of science, zoology, palaeontology, and more.Over those five years, the thirst for great science content on the web has grown tremendously and the popularity of the science blog network, and the insight that our expert writers offer, has never been higher. Science isn’t stagnant though; by its very nature, it is a continual process of reflection, revision and improvement. With that in mind, our upcoming fifth birthday seems like an excellent opportunity to take stock and start to think about the future of the network. Continue reading...

Once a certain level of income or comfort becomes your default position, you can be sure it’ll stop delivering pleasure by contrast with earlier experiencesA couple of years ago, I got to fly in the ultra-luxurious business class of an especially high-end airline; and now all lesser air travel – which means all other air travel, basically – is ruined for me forever. I’m not expecting an outpouring of sympathy for my plight. But I did feel a flicker of vindication when I read, via Scientific American, about a new study on the psychology of restaurant diners: serve them a really delicious appetizer followed by a mediocre main course, it seems, and they’ll rate the main course much more negatively than if had been preceded by something equally mediocre.The researchers – whose results were published in the appropriately titled journal Food Quality and Preference – gave participants a boring pasta dish, preceded by an appetizer of bruschetta, made either with excellent fresh ingredients, or uninspiring dried ones. The resulting difference in their assessments of the pasta illustrates a phenomenon known as “hedonic contrast”, and it’s a familiar one to food psychologists and restaurateurs alike: what counts as tasty depends on what came before. If you’re planning to dine at Olive Garden, don’t pop into Nobu for a quick amuse-bouche first. Continue reading...

Immigration was a serious issue for the Victorians - like modern Britons they worried about migrants from eastern Europe, but unlike them the people they thought ‘didn’t identify with Britain’ were Jews, not Muslims. Vanessa Heggie looks at how these fears drove the founding, and location, of the first Jewish Hospital in Britain.Some Victorian anxieties about immigration would look very familiar to us today: politicians, newspapers and the (wo)man in the street were worried by both new immigrants and by second or third generation citizens who they feared were ‘unassimilated’ and perhaps – to use David Cameron’s phrase – ‘did not really identify with Britain’. These worries included the fear of violence and terrorism: not from Muslims, but from Jews, who came to Britain in increasing numbers after 1880 fleeing pogroms in the Russian empire. Although it was probably Irish Fenians that British people most associated with violent attacks, in the popular imagination Jews were linked to anarchists, who also appeared to pose a threat to social stability. On a smaller scale, popular belief linked Jews with anti-social petty crime, and with larger criminal gangs (Fagin is just one of many literary representations of this stereotype).Immigration, particularly from eastern Europe, was blamed for high unemployment rates and low wages, as British trade unions (and others) claimed Jews had lower standards of living and would therefore work for lower wages, and in worse conditions. At the same time, even with a very limited welfare system, there were fears that immigrants would also ‘swamp’ or ‘overwhelm’ workhouses, hospitals, soup kitchens, and other forms of state assistance or private charity. The result of these fears was the Aliens Act of 1905, the first piece of legislation controlling immigration to Britain, which basically banned the immigration of poor people, or those deemed ‘undesirable’ because of ill-health, criminal records, and so on. Continue reading...

Francis O’Gorman’s study of why we worry covers everything from medieval monastic life to modern cultural theory without really providing any answersBrooding in their cells, medieval monks identified a malaise they called accidie – not acid indigestion of the soul, but an apathetic and self-disgusted inertia. It overtook them in the static afternoons, so they called it “the noonday demon”. Francis O’Gorman has a bogey of his own, which attacks him in the middle of the night, and his book about anxiety begins at 4.06 am as he works through scenarios of imaginary disaster provoked by his uncertainty about whether he has locked the back door of his house. We have all been there; some of us spend a few hours there every night, watching a digital clock indifferently bat its eyelid as we wait for the bleary dawn to brighten the sky and wipe away our panic.A monastic worrier in the fourth century, Evagrius the Solitary, said that accidie’s symptoms included “a hatred of manual labour”. O’Gorman – who is a literature professor, and as such a remote descendant of socially marginal self-flagellators like Evagrius – here sets himself a brisk therapeutic task by writing a book that attempts to cure or at least comprehend his misery. He alleviates his problem by sharing it with the rest of us: we are all, he claims, the victims of a metaphysical calamity. We worry because we no longer believe in the gods who used to control our destinies; responsible for ourselves, we are obliged to make existential choices that ought to propel us ahead but more often leave us feeling dejected, disappointed, wondering what we did wrong. Continue reading...