Cities are hubs of human activity, supercharging the exchange of ideas and interactions. Scaling theory has established that, as cities grow larger, they tend to produce more of pretty much everything from pollution and crime ...
Social Sciences
Aug 17, 2021
2
591
The history of life on Earth has often been likened to a four-billion-year-old torch relay. One flame, lit at the beginning of the chain, continues to pass on life in the same form all the way down. But what if life is better ...
Evolution
Aug 16, 2021
0
834
A single molecule contains a wealth of information. It includes not only the number of each kind of constituent atom, but also how they're arranged and how they attach to each other. And during chemical reactions, that information ...
Materials Science
Aug 3, 2021
1
436
Election outcomes are notoriously difficult to predict. In 2016, for example, most polls suggested that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency, but Donald Trump defeated her. Researchers cite multiple explanations for the ...
Social Sciences
Jun 30, 2021
1
3
A new paper in the journal Cognition examines the visual complexity of written language and how that complexity has evolved.
Education
Jun 16, 2021
1
16
A new study by ecologist André de Roos shows that differences between juveniles and adults of the same species are crucial for the stability of complex ecological communities. The research, published in Proceedings of the ...
Ecology
Jun 3, 2021
0
11
When scientists hunt for life, they often look for biosignatures, chemicals or phenomena that indicate the existence of present or past life. Yet it isn't necessarily the case that the signs of life on Earth are signs of ...
Astrobiology
May 20, 2021
0
30
The human world is, increasingly, an urban one—and that means elevators. Hong Kong, the hometown of physicist Zhijie Feng (Boston University), adds new elevators at the rate of roughly 1500 every year...making vertical ...
Mathematics
May 3, 2021
9
157
At first glance, it might seem that archaeology and ecology don't have much in common. One unearths the ancient human past; the other studies the interactions of living organisms. But taking the long view in understanding ...
Archaeology
May 3, 2021
2
29
A forest looks like a hotbed of randomness, with trees and plants scattered in wild and capricious diversity. But appearances can be deceiving, say a trio of complexity researchers at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). Underneath ...
Ecology
Apr 19, 2021
0
22
