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To understand finance, search algorithms and even evolution you need to understand Random Walks.

At one time, Wolverine served on four different superhero teams. How did he do it? He may have used graph coloring.

Can you produce a rational number by exchanging infinitely many digits of pi and e?

Only 4 steps stand between you and the secrets hidden behind RSA cryptography. Find out how to crack the world’s most commonly used form of encryption.

Classical computers struggle to crack modern encryption. But quantum computers using Shor’s Algorithm make short work of RSA cryptography. Find out how.

Using the harmonic series we can build an infinitely long bridge. It takes a very long time though. A faster method was discovered in 2009.

Can you turn your pants inside out without taking your feet off the ground?

What does the inside of a tesseract look like? Pascal’s Triangle can tell us.

What is the best voting system? Voting seems relatively straightforward, yet four of the most widely used voting systems can produce four completely different winners.

The bizarre Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, or Arrow’s Paradox, shows a counterintuitive relationship between fair voting procedures and dictatorships.

The theory of social networks allows us to mathematically model and analyze the relationships between governments, organizations and even the rival factions warring on Game of Thrones.

The days of oil may be numbered, but there’s another natural resource that’s never been touched, Asteroids.

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson, physicists have searched and searched for any hint of new particles. That search has been fruitless. Until, perhaps, now. Today on Space Time Journal Club we’ll look at a paper that reports a compelling hint of a new particle outside the standard model: the sterile neutrino.

Our laws of physics are equations of motion, along with some associated constants. We’ve talked about the symmetries of these equations, and how they lead us to conserved quantities. But this is just the tip of the theoretical iceberg - sometimes investigating the symmetries of these equations predicts entirely new physics. The standard model of particle physics is a remarkable example.

Entropy is surely one of the most intriguing and misunderstood concepts in all of physics. The entropy of the universe must always increase – so says the second law of thermodynamics. It’s a law that seems emergent from deeper laws – it’s statistical in nature – and yet may ultimately be more fundamental and unavoidable than any other law of physics.

The second law of thermodynamics – the law that entropy must, on average, increase – has been interpreted as the inevitability of the decay of structure. This is … misleading. Structure can develop in one region even as the entropy of the universe rises. Ultimately, entropy is a measure of the availability of free energy – of energy that isn’t hopelessly mixed in thermal equilibrium.

The Sun: an entity worshipped as a god throughout time and across cultures. The source of all life and sustenance for our little blue space rock, and also a force of unthinkable destructive power. But soon humanity will reach out its collective hand and come closer to touching the Sun than we ever have before with the launch of the Parker Solar Probe.

Quantum field theory is notoriously complicated, built from mind-bendingly abstract mathematics. But are the underlying rules of reality really so far from human intuition? Or are physicists just showing off? For better or worse, the physicists are definitely on the right track. We know this because the predictions of quantum field theory stand up to experimental test time and time again.

We live in an unusual age – the age when the stars still shine. We should count ourselves lucky – nearly all of future history will be dark. But events will still unfold in that long, cooling darkness, and civilizations may endure. So how will the universe and its far-future denizens spend eternity?

Black Holes should have no entropy, but they in fact hold most of the entropy in the universe. Let’s figure this out.

Billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, each with … rather a lot of particles in them. And then there's dark matter, black holes, planets, and the particles and radiation in between the stars and galaxies. But… is the universe actually made of stuff? An increasing number of physicists view the universe – view reality as informational at its most fundamental level.

Between them, general relativity and quantum mechanics seem to describe all of observable reality.

On this Space Time Journal Club we look at how gravitational waves can be used to search for extra dimensions of space!

Physics seems to be telling us that it’s possible to simulate the entire universe on a computer smaller than the universe

Why strings? What are they made of? How did physicists even come up with this bizarre idea? And what’s all this nonsense of extra dimensions?