In 1907, a statistician named Francis Galton recorded the entries from a weight-judging competition as people guessed the weight of an ox. Galton analyzed hundreds of estimates and found that while individual guesses varied ...
Mathematics
Apr 18, 2018
0
181
Symmetry appears readily in nature: on the petals of a sunflower or the spires of a snowflake. But not all symmetries are alike. Flip a square horizontally, vertically, or diagonally – these are reflectional symmetries ...
Mathematics
May 17, 2016
0
21
New research by Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Artemy Kolchinsky and Bernat Corominas-Murtra presents an important distinction for information theory—copying vs. transforming.
Mathematics
Jan 27, 2020
0
4
New SFI research challenges a popular conception of how machine learning algorithms "think" about certain tasks.
Computer Sciences
Jan 24, 2019
0
86
At two miles long and five inches in diameter, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS) ice core is a tangible record of the last 68,000 years of our planet's climate.
Earth Sciences
Dec 6, 2016
3
1078
Despite their important role as "proof-of-concept" tests in evolutionary research, mathematical models are commonly misunderstood in the biology research community.
Evolution
Dec 10, 2014
0
0
A new kind of predictive network model could help determine which people will change their minds about contentious scientific issues when presented with evidence-based information.
Social Sciences
Aug 20, 2022
17
421
Despite notable differences in appearance and governance, ancient human settlements function in much the same way as modern cities, according to new findings by researchers at the Santa Fe Institute and the University of ...
Archaeology
Feb 20, 2015
2
1404
All life on earth performs computations – and all computations require energy. From single-celled amoeba to multicellular organisms like humans, one of the most basic biological computations common across life is translation: ...
Cell & Microbiology
Nov 17, 2017
3
842
In two back-to-back symposia at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, Feb. 17, a cross-disciplinary cohort of scientists presented the first comprehensive ...
Ecology
Feb 18, 2019
0
137
