• share
• favorite_border

From small committees to national elections, group decision-making can be complicated — and it may not always settle on the best choice.

• share
• favorite_border

On average, people in larger cities are better off economically. But a new study published in the Royal Society Interface builds on previous research that says, that’s not necessarily true for the individual city-dweller. It turns out, bigger cities also produce more income inequality.

• share
• favorite_border

Social scientists can gather highly accurate information about social trends and groups by asking about a person’s social circle rather than interrogating their own individual beliefs.

• share
• favorite_border

A new paper in the journal Cognition examines the visual complexity of written language and how that complexity has evolved.

• share
• favorite_border

A new study based on evidence from Germany and on a model of the dynamic nature of people’s resistance to COVID-19 vaccination sounds an alarm: mandating vaccination could have a substantial negative impact on voluntary compliance.

• share
• favorite_border

In network science, the famous "friendship paradox" describes why your friends are (on average) more popular, richer, and more attractive than you are. But a slightly more nuanced picture emerges when we apply mathematics to real-world data.

• share
• favorite_border

New research published in Nature provides a powerful yet surprisingly simple way to determine the number of visitors to any location in a city.

• share
• favorite_border

The human world is, increasingly, an urban one — and that means elevators. Two physicists saw this as an opportunity to explore the factors that determine elevator transport capabilities in their new paper in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics.

• share
• favorite_border

By simulating the physiology and decisions of early way-finders, an international team of archaeologists, geographers, ecologists, and computer scientists has mapped the probable “superhighways” that led to the first peopling of the Australian continent some 50,000-70,000 years ago.

• share
• favorite_border

During the 2020-2021 fall semester, school districts around the United States navigated their reopening plans with little data on how SARS-CoV-2 spreads among children or how in-person learning would impact transmission in the schools’ communities. A new study in The Journal of School Health joins a growing body of evidence that, with appropriate measures, there are ways for schools to safely reopen.

• share
• favorite_border

New research shows that the more animals know about each other, the more they may be able to optimize their aggression.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists rarely have the historical data they need to see exactly how nodes in a network became connected. But a new paper in Physical Review Letters offers hope for reconstructing the missing information, using a new method to evaluate the rules that generate network models.

• share
• favorite_border

Studying ancient food webs can help scientists reconstruct communities of species, many long extinct, and even use those insights to figure out how modern-day communities might change in the future. There’s just one problem: only some species left enough of a trace for scientists to find eons later, leaving large gaps in the fossil record — and researchers’ ability to piece together the food webs from the past. A new paper shines a light on those gaps and points the way to how to account for them.

• share
• favorite_border

New work by the Collective Computation Group (C4) at the Santa Fe Institute finds that human conflict exhibits remarkable regularity despite substantial geographic and cultural differences.