Researchers who study urban areas have long observed a connection between size and proximity—namely, that cities become more dense as they gain in population. The more people live in a place, the closer together they live ...
Archaeology
Aug 21, 2018
1
38
The internet is rife with recommendation systems, suggesting movies you should watch or people you should date. These systems are tuned to match people with items, based on the assumption that similar people buy similar things ...
Computer Sciences
Dec 1, 2016
0
196
An engineer constructing wells in oil fields and an animal foraging for scarce food in the desert often face a similar dilemma: How long should they look for more of their needed resource before they move on to look elsewhere? ...
General Physics
Feb 3, 2017
0
196
A fish on the Great Barrier Reef continually acquires new information from its environment—the location of food, the murkiness of the water, and the sounds of distant ships, to name a few examples. But only some of that ...
Mathematics
Oct 23, 2018
5
40
In nonlinear dynamic systems, a change in one place can trigger an outsized change elsewhere. The climate, the workings of the human brain, and the behavior of the electric grid are all examples—and all change dramatically ...
General Physics
Sep 28, 2023
0
34
The equations that describe physical systems often assume that measurable features of the system—temperature or chemical potential, for example—can be known exactly. But the real world is messier than that, and uncertainty ...
General Physics
Jan 15, 2024
2
171
The only references we have for "life" are the forms we know on Earth. Astrobiologists suspect that the search for alien life, and even for the origins of life on Earth, may require a broader scope. A NASA-funded team of ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Feb 28, 2022
1
1088
Across small-scale societies, the practice of some males taking multiple wives is thought to be associated with extreme disparities of wealth. But in fact, polygyny has been more common among relatively egalitarian low-tech ...
Social Sciences
Jul 17, 2018
5
91
For over a century, anthropologists have attempted to describe human societies as "matrilineal" or "patrilineal"—emphasizing relatedness among women or men, respectively. A new paper by Laura Fortunato, an anthropologist ...
Social Sciences
Aug 27, 2019
4
108
Living organisms aren't the only things that evolve over time. Cultural practices change, too, and in recent years social scientists have taken a keen interest in understanding this cultural evolution. Much research has focused ...
Evolution
Oct 27, 2020
0
132
