COMPLEXITY

For as long as humans have erected walls around our cities, we’ve considered culture separate from the encircling wilder... Read more

If complex systems science had a mascot, it might be the murmuration. These enormous flocks of starlings darken skies ac... Read more

From its beginnings as a discipline nearly 150 years ago, economics rested on assumptions that don’t hold up when studie... Read more

It may be a cliché, but it’s a timeless truth regardless: who you know matters. The connectedness of actors in a network... Read more

In this show’s first episode, David Krakauer explained how art and science live along an axis of explanatory depth: scie... Read more

Science is often seen as a pure, objective discipline — as if it all rests neatly on cause and effect. As if the univers... Read more

One feature common to nonlinear phenomena is how they challenge intuitions. Maybe nowhere is this more apparent than in ... Read more

Since the term was coined in 1956, artificial intelligence has been a kind of mirror that tells us more about our theori... Read more

If you’re a human in this century, the odds are overwhelming that you are a city-dweller. These hubs of human cultural a... Read more

Over one hundred years ago, Sir Francis Galton asked 787 villagers to guess an ox’s weight. None of them got it right, b... Read more

Chances are, if you are listening to this around the time it was released, you’re listening alone. Right now the human s... Read more

We live in a world so complicated and immense it challenges our comparably simple minds to even know which information w... Read more

“We should not have a strategy that involves killing a sizable percentage of the population. But, even if you were going... Read more

It’s easy to take modern Earth for granted — our breathable atmosphere, the delicately balanced ecosystems we depend on ... Read more

Pandemics like the current novel coronavirus disease outbreak provide a powerful incentive to study the dynamics of comp... Read more

Why is the internal structure of Bacteria so different from the architecture of a nucleated cell? Why do some kinds of o... Read more

What is the difference between 100 kilograms of human being and 100 kilograms of algae? One answer to this question is t... Read more

If the economy is better understood as an evolving system, an out-of-equilibrium ecology composed of agents that adapt t... Read more

Since the first Industrial Revolution, most people have responded in one of two ways to the threat of technological unem... Read more

Science has always been about improving human understanding of our universe…but scientists have not always prioritized a... Read more