Real-time drone intent monitoring could enable safer use of drones and prevent a repeat of 2018 Gatwick incident

Researchers have developed a real-time approach that can help prevent incidents like the large-scale disruption at London’s Gatwick Airport in 2018, where

Cambridge University News • cambridge
Sept. 15, 2021 ~6 min

Using adversarial attacks to refine molecular energy predictions

MIT researchers find a new way to quantify the uncertainty in molecular energies predicted by neural networks.

Vineeth Venugopal | Department of Materials Science and Engineering • mit
Sept. 1, 2021 ~7 min


Low- and middle-income countries lack access to big data analysis – here's how to fill the gap

Data science infrastructure is sorely needed in many places. Doctors Without Borders brings medical help to nations in need, but similar efforts are relatively small for statistics.

Eric Vance, Associate Professor and Director of LISA, University of Colorado Boulder • conversation
July 20, 2021 ~8 min

Why we dispute 'Dunbar's number' – the claim humans can only maintain 150 friendships

New research calls into question the validity of 'Dunbar's number'.

Patrik Lindenfors, Researcher, Zoological Ecology, Stockholm University • conversation
June 23, 2021 ~8 min

What's a 100-year flood? A hydrologist explains

Flood plain statistics can be confusing. There are better ways to think about the risk of severe weather than 100-year storm or flood.

Robert Mace, Executive Director of the Meadows Center for Water and Environment, Texas State University • conversation
June 17, 2021 ~4 min

UFOs: how to calculate the odds that an alien spaceship has been spotted

One in a million or one in ten? Mathematics can help us work out the odds of whether recent sightings of UFOs are really alien spaceships.

Anders Sandberg, James Martin Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute & Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford • conversation
June 7, 2021 ~7 min

578,555 people have died from COVID-19 in the US, or maybe it's 912,345 – here's why it's hard to count

Record-keepers have a pretty good sense of how many people have died. But figuring out the cause of those deaths is a lot trickier – and that's why reasonable modelers can disagree.

Ronald D. Fricker Jr., Professor of Statistics and Senior Associate Dean, Virginia Tech • conversation
May 24, 2021 ~8 min

How to use statistics to prepare for the next pandemic

Many governments, including the US, already collect and make public population statistics that could help them prepare for the next pandemic.

R. Alexander Bentley, Professor of Anthropology, University of Tennessee • conversation
May 18, 2021 ~6 min


What the Euro 2020 Panini sticker album can teach us about probability

We used probability to find out what collecting all 678 stickers might cost you.

Craig Anderson, Lecturer in Statistics, University of Glasgow • conversation
May 13, 2021 ~7 min

Dunbar’s number: why my theory that humans can only maintain 150 friendships has withstood 30 years of scrutiny

The claim that our brain size limits us to 150 meaningful friendships has been challenged by a recent paper.

Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology, Department of Experimental Psycology, University of Oxford • conversation
May 12, 2021 ~8 min

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