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Why Men Rank Higher than Women at Chess (It's Not Biological)
Jan 12, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- In the recorded history of chess, world champions have always been male, not female. Further, there is currently only one woman in the top 100 chess players in the world. Because chess is ...
Study Shows How We Evolved Different Personalities
Nov 13, 2008 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Although members of the same species share more than 99 percent of their genetic makeup, individuals often have small differences, such as in their appearance, susceptibility to disease, and ...
Tribal war drove human evolution of aggression
Sep 09, 2008 |
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Wars are costly in terms of lives and resources – so why have we fought them throughout human history? In modern times, states may fight wars for a number of complex reasons. But in the past, most tribal wars were fought ...
Online Dating: Where Technology and Evolution Collide
Jun 26, 2008 |
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When searching for a soul mate, you might think that the more options, the better. But the rise of technology – notably, the Internet – has thrown a wedge in that perception.
Researchers stumped by drug addiction paradox
Apr 16, 2008 |
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From chocolate and caffeine to nicotine and cocaine, many of our most addictive foods and drugs come from plant toxins. Considering that plants originally developed these toxins to deter herbivorous predators, ...
How We Localize Surround Sound
Jan 09, 2008 |
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You're walking down a busy street, with cars and buses driving past and bits of conversations reaching your ears, when you hear someone call your name. You turn about 60 degrees to your left and look up to ...
Researchers Study Digg.com to Investigate Collective Attention
Nov 16, 2007 |
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In a world where millions of people are bombarded with thousands of messages daily, understanding how some messages become popular among large populations is vital for successful advertising, marketing and ...
Shoppers' Spending Habits Follow Well-Known Economic Law
Oct 26, 2007 |
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By analyzing 100 million receipts from 1,000 Japanese am/pm convenience stores, researchers have discovered a strong economic inequality among shoppers. Among their findings is that the top 25% and 2% of the ...
'Snowdrift' game tops 'Prisoner's Dilemma' in explaining cooperation
Oct 09, 2007 |
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When it comes to explaining the evolution of human cooperation, researchers have traditionally looked to the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD) game as the paradigm. However, the observed degree of cooperation ...
Study maps network of 7 million cell phone users
May 14, 2007 |
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Scientists have constructed a map of a societal communication network based on the mobile phone usage of 7 million individuals during a span of 18 weeks. As the first study to have access to a large amount ...
Can expert reasoning be taught?
Feb 09, 2007 |
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In addition to mastering a large body of knowledge, successful researchers must acquire a host of high-level cognitive skills: critical thinking, "framing" a problem, ongoing evaluation of the solution as it ...
For computer scientists exploring face recognition, the question is 'who?'
Feb 07, 2007 |
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One of the most challenging tasks for computer vision researchers is to design a system that can automatically recognize individual faces. Humans, who can perform this task in as little as 50 milliseconds—almost ...
'Misdirected and unreasonable' acts of kindness can have significant consequences
Jan 31, 2007 |
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There is a story about a guy who makes a point to be kind to his taxi driver, giving him a sincere thanks and a generous tip. The guy reasons that, if the taxi driver is then inspired to be kind to each of ...
Analogy of cochlea as resonator could lead to artificial copies
Jan 09, 2007 |
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In attempting to construct an artificial cochlea—and faced with limited knowledge of how the living chamber works—scientists might need to look no further than a simple electronic device: a surface acoustic ...
Computer scientists put social network theory to the test
Aug 10, 2006 |
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Ever since 1969, when psychologists Jeffery Travers and Stanley Milgram first explained that everyone was separated by only six connections from anyone else, researchers have created theoretical models of the networks that ...
