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As children, we all learn about numbers. We start with counting, followed by addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. But mathematicians know that the number system we study in school is but one of many possibilities

In the May 2011 issue of Scientific American mathematician John Baez co-authors "The Strangest Numbers in String Theory," an article about the octonions, an eight-dimensional number system that was discovered in the mid–19th century but that has been largely ignored until quite recently. As the name of the article implies, interest in the octonions has been rekindled by their surprising relationship to recent developments in theoretical physics, including supersymmetry, string theory and M-theory.

Key concepts Electricity [More]

Time-shared access to supercomputers or computing clusters cloistered in laboratory data rooms and university basements has helped scientists for decades with problems requiring massive amounts of number-crunching muscle. This is now changing as scientists come to rely on software and storage delivered via the Web, aka "cloud computing," as a resource for organizing and analyzing research data. Biotech and physical sciences are two fields in particular that are gravitating skyward, at least piecemeal

Spontaneous patriotic chants and flag-waving crowds were sparked by word that Osama bin Laden had been killed earlier this week.

The idea of cloud computing is to make all the information and services run in data centers around the world available via the Web. The reality of this is daunting.

A robot must protect its own existence. [More]

In their August 28th, 1869 issue, Scientific American listed some techniques to aid in restoring breath to “persons apparently dead from drowning.” The methods were given by Professor Benjamin Howard and were sanctioned by the Metropolitan Board of Health of the city of New York. [More]

Could plastic bottles and metal food can liners be contributing to the American asthma epidemic? A study presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting this past weekend suggests so, finding that pregnant women exposed to bisphenol A ( BPA )--a chemical building block of plastics from polycarbonate to polyester--gave birth to children with a higher risk of respiratory problems

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazine Memories fade, events get conflated, names get attached to the wrong faces, or, in the case of post-traumatic stress disorder, signals in safe environments can mistakenly evoke emotions that rightly belong to a battlefield tragedy. [More]

The raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan was planned and conducted in secret. Only a handful of U.S. officials knew about it in advance, and the international community was kept in the dark.

Changing wind patterns could accelerate sea level rise along the West Coast, new research suggests. The cause is an apparent shift in a climate cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO, said researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography

The notion that airships represent the future of air cargo is being revived by a new generation of entrepreneurs some 75 years after a catastrophic fireball brought the industry to a screeching halt. Far safer than the Hindenburg, whose tragic 1937 docking remains an icon of aerospace gone wrong, these modern airships are a hybrid of lighter-than-air and fixed-wing aircraft

Protesters have developed a novel way of smuggling information to the outside world: trading in their mobile camera phones for small, discreet pen cameras. While Bashar al-Assad's government in Syria has not been engaging in violence on a Qadaffi-like scale, snipers have reportedly fired on peaceful protesters and civilian casualties were reported in several cities recently.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Workers at Japan's crippled nuclear plant began putting up equipment on Tuesday to allow the start of repairs to its cooling systems, key to bringing reactors under control after they were badly damaged in the March 11 quake and tsunami. Soldiers moved to within 10 km (6 miles) of the Fukushima complex to search for those still missing following the disaster, the first time the military is conducting searches in this area since the plant began leaking radiation after the disaster hit. [More]