Gases and fluids are made up of gazillions of atoms or molecules, yet when we observe them they appear to us as a whole. They have features such as temperature or pressure, which we can easily measure without looking to see what every individual particle is doing. The kinetic theory of gases goes...

Some of the members of the INTEGRAL team who spoke to us over zoom. From top left: Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, James Woodcock, Angelica Aviles-Rivero, Saurabh Pandey, Sanjay Bisht, Debmita Bandyopadhyay, Rihuan Ke, David Coomes. It's amazing what you can see now thanks to remote imaging technology!...

Drawing pictures is incredibly useful when doing maths. They help build your intuition, allow you to have fun playing around, and sometimes pictures can even serve as proof. Below is a selection of articles exploring proofs in which pictures play an important role. If you'd like to try your own...

When you put your hand in the fire you'll get burnt, and when you put it in the snow your fingers will get cold. Temperature is something our bodies can easily sense, and it's a very important phenomenon in the physical world. But what exactly is temperature? Why is ice cold? Statistical mechanics...

Marianne FreibergerThe Spanish flu pandemic came to an end because people who caught the disease (and didn't die) acquired long-lasting immunity. The pandemic killed tens of millions of people between 1918 and 1920. After an estimated 500 million people around the world had become infected there...

What's the chance that a random woman you meet on the street is exactly 170cm tall? The question seems impossible to answer, but luckily maths can help. It tells us that the heights of people follow a probability distribution known as the normal distribution (also sometimes called a Gaussian...

Probability distributions turn up in all areas of science (and in many Plus articles) so we've decided to have a closer look at them. The short explainers below explore what a probability distribution actually is, visit some of the most commonly used distributions, and a few important concepts in...

Suppose that during a given time period an event happens on average times. For example, you might know that on average you'll see three new posts on your social media feed per minute. This doesn't mean that the event will occur at regular intervals: seeing three posts a minute on average doesn't...

Probability distributions describe processes that can have more than one outcome which you can't be sure about in advance. An example is rolling a die. There are six possible outcomes, namely the numbers 1 up to 6. As long as the die is fair, these are all equally likely to happen — you're just as...

Suppose that during a given time period an event happens on average times. For example, you might know that on average you'll see three new posts on your social media feed per minute. This doesn't mean that the event will occur at regular intervals: seeing three posts a minute on average doesn't...