Humankind first started farming in Mesopotamia about 11,500 years ago. Subsequently, the practices of cultivating crops and raising livestock emerged independently at perhaps a dozen other places around the world, in what ...
Archaeology
Oct 11, 2019
21
1322
The friendship paradox is the observation that the degrees of the neighbors of a node within any network will, on average, be greater than the degree of the node itself. In other words: your friends probably have more friends ...
Mathematics
Jun 4, 2021
0
10
Mathematicians who study dynamical systems often focus on the rules of attraction. Namely, how does the choice of the starting point affect where a system ends up? Some systems are easier to describe than others. A swinging ...
Mathematics
Nov 4, 2021
0
58
While Rolf Landauer was working at IBM in the early 1960s, he had a startling insight about how heat, entropy, and information were connected. Landauer realized that manipulating information releases heat and increases entropy, ...
General Physics
Nov 5, 2021
1
298
If you've ever struggled to pack a bunch of suitcases into the trunk of your car, you've got some idea of a basic problem in materials science: if you throw a bunch of atoms or molecules together, how do they fit together, ...
Mathematics
Mar 3, 2015
0
10
Whether we decide to take out that insurance policy, buy Bitcoin, or switch jobs, many economic decisions boil down to a fundamental gamble about how to maximize our wealth over time. How we understand these decisions is ...
General Physics
Dec 2, 2019
11
860
November 1 marked the end of Major League Baseball in 2015, as NBA basketball launched its 2015-2016 regular season on October 27. If you're following the games this year, you may want to watch for patterns predicted by recent ...
Mathematics
Nov 3, 2015
0
30
(Phys.org)—Describing how living organisms emerged from Earth's abiotic chemistry has remained a conundrum for scientists, in part because any credible explanation for such a complex process must draw from fields spanning ...
Biochemistry
Dec 13, 2012
20
0
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 ...
Social Sciences
Sep 10, 2021
3
1939
While the human toll of the COVID-19 pandemic has been apparent for some time, the economic picture is now starting to come into greater focus. Initial unemployment claims in the United States jumped from 280,000 to almost ...
Economics & Business
Apr 7, 2020
0
3
