When does reputation lie?

Consider two stories: the first, about a boy who gets all the attention. He's the cool kid in class who comes from a well-known family. He seems to soar through life. When he errs, few seem to care. The more popular he is, ...

Social science for algorithmic societies

Machine learning algorithms pervade modern life. They shape decisions about who gets a mortgage, who gets a job, and who gets bail, and have become so enmeshed in our political and economic processes that some scientists ...

Researchers reconstruct major branches in the tree of language

The diversity of human languages can be likened to branches on a tree. If you're reading this in English, you're on a branch that traces back to a common ancestor with Scots, which traces back to a more distant ancestor that ...

Study: As cities grow in size, the poor 'get nothing at all'

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 ...

A new theory of life's multiple origins

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 ...

How chemical reactions compute

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 ...

page 6 from 27