Knots are widespread, universal physical structures, from shoelaces to Celtic decoration to the many variants familiar to sailors. They are often simple to construct and aesthetically appealing, yet remain topologically and mechanically quite complex.

Knots are also common in biopolymers such as DNA and proteins, with significant and often detrimental effects, and biological mechanisms also exist for 'unknotting'.

Oxford Mathematician John Allen, Professor Emeritus of Engineering Science, talks about his work on the electrohydrodynamic stability of a plasma-liquid interface. His collaborators are Joshua Holgate and Michael Coppins at Imperial College.

The brain is the most complicated organ of any animal, formed and sculpted over 500 million years of evolution. And the cerebral cortex is a critical component. This folded grey matter forms the outside of the brain, and is the seat of higher cognitive functions such as language, episodic memory and voluntary movement.

What does boiling water have in common with magnets and the horizon of black holes? They are all described by conformal field theories (CFTs)! We are used to physical systems that are invariant under translations and rotations. Imagine a system which is also invariant under scale transformations. Such a system is described by a conformal field theory. Remarkably, many physical systems admit such a description and conformal field theory is ubiquitous in our current theoretical understanding of nature.

Oxford Mathematicians Dominic Vella and Finn Box together with colleague Alfonso Castrejón-Pita from Engineering Science in Oxford and Maxime Inizan from MIT have won the annual video competition run by the UK Fluids Network. Here they describe their work and the film.

Americans drink an average of 3.1 cups of coffee per day (and mathematicans probably even more). When carrying a liquid, common sense says walk slowly and refrain from overfilling the container. But easier said than followed. Cue sloshing.

Oxford Mathematician Soumya Banerjee talks about his current work in progress.

"On warm summer days, fireflies mesmerise us with their glowing lights. They produce this cold light using a light-emitting molecule, the luciferin, and a complementary enzyme, luciferase. This process is known as bioluminescence.