Welcome to the fourth and final post of our series on summer reads!
Evolutionary algorithms in the fight against cancer
In his article Stef Maree wrote about his research on evolutionary algorithms and how they are used to help physicians in the Amsterdam UMC to make treatment plans for prostate cancer patients.
Synchrony, genetics and poppies
Genetics keeps amazing scientists and researchers. In her article Margriet Oomen wrote about "The seed bank, a hidden storage of genetic diversity". A natural seed bank arises from seeds of plants that fall into the soil, but do not germinate in the next spring. This happens for example if a storm covers the seeds with thick layer of sand. Or when a squirrel burrows the seeds, but does not dig them up later on. If some years later the layer of sand disappears and the weather is good, the seed can still germinate.
Janusz Meylahn wrote a series of articles on a topic he has been doing research on, neural synchrony. In his latest article you can read about neural synchrony and how it is related to something many of us have experienced, jet-lag.
Illustration made by Alex Nazlidis
In the follow up article Janusz goes deeper in the mathematics and how the mathematical model works. An animation developed by Martijn Gösgens illustrates how the two-community model works!
Financial networks and bitcoins
Are you more curious in finance and inter-bank networks. Then you can have a look at this article written by Diego Garlaschelli and Tiziano Squartini.
"A complete overview of interbank exchanges would help prevent a new financial collapse. However, banks do not provide this information: this is why a “network reconstruction” methodology to infer the unobserved connections is needed."
Or maybe would you like to see how a researcher in queueing theory views bitcoin? In his article David Koops describes what bitcoin actually is, how it works and how it resembles a queue!
The quantum mystery
If you want to use the free time and relaxed tempo of the summer to challenge your mind with a story from quantum mechanics then Farrokh Labib has prepared something for you. An article about the weird phenomenon called quantum entanglement, to which Albert Einstein referred as "spooky action at a distance"!
This post finalizes the summer readis series! From next week we start again with new contributions!