A new study reveals that the Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia (c. 6200–5500 BCE) produced the earliest systematic plant imagery in prehistoric art, flowers, shrubs, branches, and trees painted on fine pottery, arranged with precise symmetry and numerical sequences, especially petal and flower counts of 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64. This suggests that early farming villages in the Near East already possessed sophisticated, practical mathematical thinking about dividing space and quantities, likely tied to everyday needs such as fairly sharing crops from collectively worked fields, long before writing or formal number systems existed.

 Researchers from BI Norwegian Business School and NHH Norwegian School of Economics have developed a new behavioral credit-risk model that integrates credit and debit transactions. The model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art machine learning methods in predicting credit card delinquency and offers clearer insight into the behavioral drivers behind repayment problems.

Scientists at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) in Japan have discovered a way to make a superconducting thin film from iron telluride, which is surprising because it is not normally superconducting. Being superconducting at extremely low temperatures makes it suitable for use in quantum computing. In addition to this particular new thin film, the new method of fabrication should greatly impact thin-film research in general.

In Chaos, researchers establish a theory for how microplastic particles may accumulate in a circular current. They began by modeling how fluid moves in a rotating cylinder and accounted for the complication of microplastics having inertia and disrupting the fluid around them, which causes them to slowly stray from the fluid’s usual path. Exploiting the mathematics behind this allowed them to develop a theory for how and where particles accumulate, and applying the theory to ocean flows can help determine subsurface areas with high concentrations of microplastics.

University of Warwick scientists discover “hot spots” around atomic defects in diamonds – challenging assumptions about the world’s best heat conductor.

NH₃ has emerged as a promising candidate for low-carbon gas turbines, with NO_x emission issues being mitigated by air-staged combustion. However, the role of fuel/air mixing quality (represented by unmixedness) in NO_x formation in NH₃ systems remains poorly explored. In this study, the characteristics of NO_x formation under the effects of unmixedness have been numerically investigated using an NH₃/CH₄ fired air-staged model combustor consisting of perfectly stirred reactors (PSRs) and plug flow reactors (PFRs), employing the 84-species, 703-reaction Tian mechanism under H/J heavy duty gas turbine conditions. It was found that a primary-stage equivalence ratio of 1.2–1.5 corresponds to a low NO_x formation region under perfectly mixed fuel and air conditions. In this region, a relatively low NO_x formation is achieved when the unmixedness is less than 0.12 and NO_x formation exhibits low sensitivity to fuel/air unmixedness. Based on these findings and the fact that the air-staged combustion loses its advantage in reducing NO_x emissions when the unmixedness exceeds 0.12 across all equivalence ratios, recommended mixing quality thresholds for different equivalence ratios are proposed to guide combustor design and operation optimization. A parametric study of chemical reaction pathways at different unmixedness levels in the two stages demonstrates that NO_x is mainly formed in the main combustion zone of the secondary stage via the HNO pathway, which results in NO_x formation rising to thousand ppm when unmixedness exceeds 0.3, although NO_x reduction through NHi and N₂O pathways partially offsets contributions from the HNO and thermal NO_x pathways. To leverage the NO_x reduction potential of the NH_i and N₂O pathways, the residence time in both stages should be carefully adjusted to help suppress NO_x to as low as 48 ppm. The results of this study are important for engineering applications, providing guidance for the design of NH₃ fired combustors aimed at significantly reducing NO_x formation.

"We undertook this difficult study to understand fatigue," said senior author Daniel Forger, a University of Michigan professor of mathematics. "We're seeing profound changes in the brain over the course of the day as we stay awake and they seem to be corrected as we go to sleep."