Sociology

The story of the tennis star spotlights the pseudoscience that bedevils science and society.

A masterclass on what science needs now.

They look like scientific papers. But they’re distorting and killing science.

How a bad “fact” helped the lab-leak hypothesis go viral.

Redford Center Stories Grand Prize-winning film spotlights ways even a tiny ripple can change the narrative.

When people sensationalize research, parents pay the price.

What if the first woman scientist was simply the first woman?

By re-imagining ancient practices, Pacific Islanders are charting a new course for ocean conservation

It’s not easy to overcome the masculine conception of fatherhood.

War is purposeful and calculating. The more organized we are, the better we get at fighting.

The trouble with academia.

The pandemic exposed racial injustice in healthcare. Vaccine distribution must not.

Exposing the damned lies of three science pioneers.

Ghost roads of robot workhorses will power cities through the shocks of the 21st century.

Handwashing, mask-wearing and physical distancing are the easy part. The true challenge is to face the pain and suffering that exists all around us and know that doing so will not break us.Illustration by Blinx / Shutterstock COVID has reached peak unsexiness. The thought occurs to me as I scroll through previously lively physician COVID forums where […]

A new film shines a light on the discrimination women often face in science practice.

  In their 1968 book The Population Bomb, biologists Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne foretold a Malthusian future of famine and disease if humanity failed to control its growth. The Ehrlichs’ warning made sense. At the time, the global population sat at about 3.5 billion, and its rate of growth was 2.1 percent—close to […]

This sort of research can, piece by piece, help reshape the online landscape so it isn’t quite so tribal and awash in misinformation and vitriol.Photograph by Prostock-studio / Shutterstock Giant tech companies and governments largely determine what content is and isn’t allowed online, and their decisions impact billions of people: 55 percent of internet users […]

Together, the data imply that the post-pandemic cityscape may be less sexy than the countryside.Photograph by Tero Vesalainen / Shutterstock The pandemic is making its way into every corner of our lives—even the bedroom. While many parts of the world gradually return to normal, the United States still wrestles with the fallout of a mismanaged […]

Stuart Ritchie is a Lecturer in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London. His new book, Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth, explains the ideas in this comic, by Zach Weinersmith, in more detail, telling shocking stories of scientific error and misconduct. It also proposes […]

The COVID-19 death rate in Sweden has exposed worldwide bias against the elderly.

China’s health codes allow people to resume their lives with confidence. At what cost?

Amid one disaster after another, Mozambique rebuilds.

Scientists putting their career and health on the line can take heart from Galileo.

Scientists putting their lives on the line can take heart from a great astronomer.

The final outcome of COVID-19 is still unclear. It will ultimately be decided by our patience and the financial bottom line.Castleski / Shutterstock On January 5, six days after China officially announced a spate of unusual pneumonia cases, a team of researchers at Shanghai’s Fudan University deposited the full genome sequence of the causal virus, […]

Tracking the information zombie apocalypse.

How to be vigilant and cautious without slamming the panic button.

Take comfort that we live on a very old, durable planet.

Mapping the world’s psychological traits.

Thinking out of the nuclear family box.

A masterclass on what science needs now.

An expert on animal societies on what sets human societies apart.

In physics and in life, choice and possibility play against each other.

We’re not as bad as the headlines make us out to be.

Psychologist Susan Pinker on the role of choice in gender differences in the workplace.

Before Rachel Carson there was Ellen Swallow Richards, MIT’s first female student.

Through their networks of friends, singles are strengthening society’s social bonds.

It is possible to imagine, explore, and promote forms of consciousness that enhance awareness as well as dissolve the artificial illusions of self and separate identity.Photo illustration by Shane Taremi / Flickr The Canadian poet Dennis Lee once wrote that the consolations of existence might be improved if we thought, worked, and lived as though […]

What our experiment in the desert taught us about social networks and human cooperation.

You could be forgiven for balking at the idea that our post-World War II reality represents a “Long Peace.” The phrase, given the prevalence of violent conflict worldwide, sounds more like how Obi-wan Kenobi might describe the period “before the dark times, before the Empire.” And yet, the “Long Peace” has been a long-argued over […]

Behavioral scientists explain why Mars missions need humor.

A lesson in how to break out of filter bubbles.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt on politics, morality, and the coddling of the American mind.

How communication technologies shaped the arts and sciences.

There are lots of reasons why colonizing space seems compelling. The popular astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson argues that it would stimulate the economy and inspire the next generation of scientists. Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX, argues that “there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multiplanetary…to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event […]

Two philosophers of science diagnose our age of fake news.

Two philosophers of science diagnose our age of fake news.

Emerging science is putting the lie to American meritocracy.

Our culture has two types of forgetting.

Around the world, people are living longer, healthier lives than ever before. One area this is most visible is in the number of centenarians, or people living to the age of 100. In 1840, there were 90 centenarians in the United States—one for every 189,000 people—according to United States Census Bureau records. Today, there are […]

Our algorithm said a courtesy driver should have won the Nobel Prize.

A scientist tells us how her field instills timefulness.

How online personalities are quantified and compared.

Why Errol Morris is still outraged by the famous philosopher of science.

How cuisine bridges cultures.

How culture and history make American and Russian smiles different.

John Carreyrou talks to Nautilus about the lessons of a $1 billion fraud.

Our discrete cultural universes are not easily bridged.Inca Princess – La Gran Ñusta Mama Occollo (early 1800s) / Denver Art Museum / Wikicommons If they’re honest and humble enough, people who study societies that existed in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans will admit that they don’t really understand those societies. They’ll know the facts about […]

My team thought we’d proved cosmological inflation. We were wrong.

Psychologist Susan Pinker on the role of choice in gender differences in the workplace.

Taking lessons from the rise and fall of divinity in online games.

There’s an easy narrative about the fracturing of the modern community: Falling marriage rates produce more single-person households, digital technologies disrupt in-person interactions, and identity politics cast one group against another. Our centuries-long devotion to the idea of the individual, it seems, has gone too far. But, as sociologist Gary Marx observed 20 years ago, […]

In broadest terms, the danger facing the world is that the superpowers have institutionalized a major nuclear showdown.Photograph by U.S. Army Photographic Signal Corps / Wikipedia When opposing nations gained access to nuclear weapons, it fundamentally changed the logic of war. You might say that it made questions about war more cleanly logical—with nuclear-armed belligerents, […]

Why city designers are increasingly thinking about the female perspective.

Why city designers are increasingly thinking about the female perspective.

Simple-majority democracy is used by many animals. But they don’t have social media.

Predatory journals keep the pseudoscience flowing.

What we don’t tell our children.

  “I against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world.”—Nafisa Haji, The Sweetness of Tears Last month, I published an article on Nautilus called “Is Tribalism a Natural Malfunction?”. It was a meditation on a series of computer experiments in the study of Prisoner’s […]

What computers teach us about getting along.

GE’s marketing chief speaks about inspiring new science and technology workers.

Emojis are the body language of the digital age.

Understanding any city requires understanding how all cities scale.

Why the majority of physicists are on one side of a recent exchange of letters.

U.S. prisons aren’t prepared for an inmate population that is getting older and sicker.

The surprising effects of reducing empathy for your own ingroup.

If men take more risks than women, it’s not because of biology.

U.S. prisons aren’t prepared for an inmate population that is getting older and sicker.

Cancer doctors are overworked, retire early, and attract fewer recruits than other specialties, leaving the rising cancer-patient population vulnerable. Here’s what must be done.

One nice thing about favorite numbers is that there are so many to choose from.Image by Ecelop / Shutterstock Go ahead, admit it. Like a lot of people, you have a favorite number. Maybe you’re not as extreme as Sheldon Cooper, the arch-nerd character on television’s Big Bang Theory, who loves the number 73: “73 […]

Hope Jahren, a geobiologist at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, is “very cynical about efforts to get girls into science.”Photograph by GSK / Flickr Why should the share of women in a given occupation affect its average pay? It’s a curious inverse relationship. Census data show that when the former increases, the latter decreases—when […]

A growing portion of the elderly look and act anything but.

Genetic cancer screening is a microcosm of racial disparities in breast cancer care.

The joy and toll of doing remote science.

Thinking out of the nuclear family box.

Cailin O’Connor—a philosopher, scientist, and mathematician—may not enjoy tense situations, but they fascinate her. Last year, in a Huffington Post article titled “Game Theory and The Walking Dead,” she wrote that the zombie show’s “plot lines are rich with strategic tension.” She goes on to analyze three of what she calls “the most strategically compelling […]

The changing image of the TV scientist.

Political pundits have had some explaining to do since the Presidential election. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver and other analysts have come under fire for assigning a high likelihood to Hillary Clinton’s victory—their predictions ranged from a 70 percent to 99 percent chance of her winning the Electoral College. Clinton’s loss prompted people to question the trustworthiness […]

Making up names and CVs is one of the latest tricks to game scientific metrics.

Even this one.

It’s your last year of college and you’re trying to answer the dreaded question of what comes next. Whether your major once seemed incredibly broad or totally specialized, you’ve realized that the path ahead is still wide open. It’s a huge decision, of course, so you want to make sure you’re fully informed. You’ve thought […]

The arXiv preprint service is trying to answer an age-old question.

Real spaces, not digital ones, will fix our politics.

There is a church in Argentina called Iglesia Maradona. In this church, God is football—soccer—and its prophet is the renowned player Diego Armando Maradona. Founded in 1998, the year after the star’s retirement, the Church of Iglesia Maradona now has some 120,000 members worldwide, who bear its insignia D10S—a portmanteau of Dios, the Spanish word […]

From bouncy castle soccer to foot golf, we are still inventing new sports.

Why questioning the value of sports is seen as blasphemy.

Fantasy sports are more skill-based than real ones.

Vulcan shows us science beyond the scientific method.

The science historian talks to Nautilus.

The stories have become all too familiar in Japan, though people often do their best to ignore them. An elderly or middle-aged person, usually a man, is found dead, at home in his apartment, frequently right in his bed. It has been days, weeks, or even months since he has had contact with another human […]

Funding, incentives, and skepticism of theory make some scientists play it safe.

We tend to be cooperative—unless we think too much.

On New Year’s Day, perhaps as a way to celebrate, the National Women’s Political Caucus endorsed Hillary Clinton for President. The NWPC, based in Washington, D.C., is a grassroots organization aiming to increase the presence of women in politics—well under one quarter of our nation’s politicians are women. Paula Willmarth, the NWPC’s Vice President of […]

A growing portion of the elderly look and act anything but.

A growing portion of the elderly look and act anything but.

The increasingly complex border between science and society is changing both.

Physics is not just what happens in the Department of Physics.

Apps that make it easy to invade kids’ privacy are a recipe for arrested development.

We know when people usually get married. We know who never marries. Finally, it’s time to look at the other side: divorce and remarriage. The chart below shows cumulative rates for different groups of people in the United States, based on 2014 American Community Survey, 1-year estimates. For example, by age 60, among the employed in 2014 […]

The open nature of the science of classification virtually guarantees fights.

Improving the lives of disabled people is more than an engineering project.

Bella DePaulo never fantasized about a dream wedding or being a bridesmaid. Instead, she saw herself as “single at heart,” pursuing intellectual refinement, friendship, and solitude as a young psychologist. Still, she had internalized the popular idea that married people were happier and healthier than the unmarried, and took her own pleasant experience to be […]

Through their networks of friends, singles are strengthening society’s social bonds.

Through their networks of friends, singles are strengthening society’s social bonds.

The science of waiting in modern courtship.

Social media encourages us to follow those we envy.

Shutterstock/Rawpixel.com By the year 2020 five separate generations will occupy the workplace: Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen 2020. In just five years, the newest person hired at a company could be working right next to her great grandfather. This half-century age gap is unprecedented. And with Millennials now the biggest proportion of […]

Could war games replace the real thing?

Our obsession with cleanliness is running afoul of scientific reality.

Why your wardrobe is wine-hued this year.

When Italian authorities confirmed that James Gandolfini had just died in Rome of an apparent heart attack in 2013, many reports in American media fronted the fact that Gandolfini’s body would be autopsied, “as required by Italian law.” They emphasized this news for understandable reasons—an autopsy on someone who died in medical care seemed unusual. […]

The precariousness of game theory.

A group of Hasidic Jews walking the streets of Brooklyndiluvi.com Anna i Adria via Wikipedia In 1983, Yosef Eckstein an ultra-orthodox rabbi in Brooklyn, New York, had reason to be happy: His wife had just given birth to their fifth child. But the couple’s happiness was short-lived: The child was soon diagnosed with Tay–Sachs disease, […]

One-night stands and friends with benefits are just what your brain ordered.

Blind to the mathematical odds, we fall to the marketing gods.

The success of the Mormon religion is a study in social adaptation.

The success of the Mormon religion is a study in social adaptation.

How to do divorce, divestment, and death properly.

We affect our children’s gender, and it affects us back.

We affect our children’s gender, and it affects us back.

Does the Fame Virus plague our youth, and is multimedia to blame?

Monks relaxing in Sikkim, Indiaflowcomm via Flickr Robert Levine, a social psychologist at California State University, Fresno, will always remember a conversation he had with an exchange student from Burkina Faso, in Western Africa. Levine had complained to the student that he’d wasted the morning “yakking in a café” instead of doing his work. The […]

A woman walks in to the room. She is wearing a white dress and has a mole over her bright red lips. She could be anybody, but you might have instantly guessed she was Marilyn Monroe. For every famous person, there is a handful of traits that we use to recognize them. Caricaturists and comedians […]

Why do things go viral, and should we care?

Why do things go viral, and should we care?

Why do things go viral, and should we care?

Does the Fame Virus plague our youth, and is multimedia to blame?

How cities are like Kim Kardashian.

How cities are like Kim Kardashian.

Why is a statement like “vaccines cause autism” persuasive or not? Each side of the issue will no doubt claim some support, but if we know anything about psychology, it’s that facts don’t always settle an argument. Those who claim a link between vaccines and autism—without any evidence to support this claim—are just as certain […]

Lies, high heels, and piety.

The decision to have a child is more ethically uncertain than you might realize.

The decision to have a child is more ethically uncertain than you might realize.