* Astronomy

Dr Eugene Starostin and Dr Gert van der Heijden (both from UCL Civil & Environmental Engineering) last week published the solution to a 75-year-old mystery.
The two academics have discovered how to predict the shape of a Möbius strip, the endless ribbon which is obtained by taking a rectangular strip of paper, twisting one end through 180 degrees, and then joining the ends.
The shape takes its name from August Möbius, the German mathematician who presented his discovery of a 3D-shape with only one side to the Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1858. The shape was rediscovered by artists and famously depicted by Escher.
The first papers that attempted to work out how to predict the 3D shape of an inextensible Möbius strip were published in 1930, but the problem has remained unresolved until now.

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