The Atlantic reveals the fluid dynamics of deadly mob disasters that shows how crowds can be so blindly powerful:

“It happens like magic,” says Dirk Helbing, a professor in Zurich, Switzerland, who studies sociology and crowd modeling. “People don’t have to think about it, you don’t need to have legal regulations or policemen to organize the crowd. It just [...]

Nature blogger Graham Morehead isn’t looking over any new research with this post, which makes it all the more remarkable. Since the early 1960s, we’ve known that offering money as a reward makes us worse at solving problems:

Knowing what was going to happen didn’t help. His new division became just as crisis-soaked and hectic as the last one. Then [...]

Forbes takes us one step closer to the Facebook-dominated society with a Northern Illinois University study that finds a quick social media review works better than standard employment surveys:

But there’s another good reason for checking out a candidate’s Facebook page before inviting them in for an interview: it may be a fairly accurate reflection of how good they’ll [...]

“Only when creative people take ownership of cosmic discovery will society accept science as the cultural activity that it is.”

- Neil deGrasse Tyson answering the question, “What is your opinion of the Symphony of Science videos?”

That’s the idea behind a study by University of Oxford and the University of Auckland researchers in PhysOrg. The scientists found that our ability to live in lots of different social settings is what sets us apart from other primates:

The study analysed patterns of social groups among living primates, as well as examining the ‘the root’ of the [...]

Scientific American interviews Brian David Johnson, Intel’s “future caster,” who combines science fiction with software and hardware design to predict what’s happening next:

How can science fiction influence real-world research and development?
There’s a great symbiotic history between science fiction and science fact—fiction informs fact. I go out and I do a lot of lectures on AI [artificial intelligence] and [...]

PhysOrg reveals a one-sided increase in sexual imagery. Men are as manly now as in years past, but women are getting more “pornified” than ever:

Erin Hatton, PhD, and Mary Nell Trautner, PhD, assistant professors in the UB Department of Sociology, are the authors of “Equal Opportunity Objectification? The Sexualization of Men and Women on the Cover of Rolling [...]

We’ve got until August 2013. All of us. Technology Review is teaching us how we can count down to the food riots:

… Marco Lagi and buddies at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, say they’ve found a single factor that seems to trigger riots around the world.

This single factor is the price of food. Lagi and co [...]

Time reveals more of the Pentagon’s social media warfare research:

The new Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program was submitted under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an arm of the Department of Defense. The goal is to “develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base” to help the agency keep [...]