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People may be more willing to get vaccinated when told how popular it is.

All the latest titles from the experts at MIT.

For the cosmos, it’s all too easy being green. Stars come in a wide variety of colors, but never green. Stars form in a wide variety of sizes, colors and masses, […]

Sometimes the value of soft skills feels almost secretive—like some scrap of knowledge handed down through an ancient society of corporate recruiters. Of course, that’s not the case or that’s […]

Recent American presidents have all faced a crisis of legitimacy in a trend that threatens the health of our democracy.

MIT Professor Sinan Aral’s new book, “The Hype Machine,” explores the perils and promise of social media in a time of discord.

We still don’t know how it came to be this way. Every once in a while, we find an object in the Universe that completely mystifies us. For generations, astronomers have […]

“Superstar” firms have been lowering labor’s share of GDP in recent decades, a new study finds.

Recognizing the consequences of your actions requires consideration of the long game.

Study finds that readers are still the best judge of fake news and misinformation.

Natural “narrative selection” was key to turning insignificant apes (who had tools for 2 million years) into the species that now dominates the bio-sphere. 

An old fight between philosophy and science has flared up again. Fortunately we have Rebecca Newberger Goldstein to help us sort out what’s going. 

Charles Darwin probably wouldn’t like what his name now means. He called any “Darwinian” human, having no trace of team loyalty, “an unnatural monster.”

The press says yes. But what does the science say? “This isn’t my life anymore, Mulder. I’m done chasing monsters in the dark.” –Dana Scully, X-files Without a doubt, one […]

The way to greatness requires us to look forwards, not backwards. “Whenever I found out anything remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, […]

“Teamwork is the signature adaptation of” humanity, says David Sloan Wilson. And our ancestors evolved ruthlessly cooperative means of ensuring productive social coordination. 

Many don’t have a leg to stand on where their understanding of evolution is concerned. David Sloan Wilson (head of the Evolution Institute) says “natural selection is life Monopoly.” But, it could be more like basketball…

A key thought experiment, the “tragedy of the commons,” is widely misunderstood, especially among certain kinds of economists. Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for showing how irrational they can be. 

Hayek viewed markets as distributed-intelligence systems that evolved to compute resource allocations. We can now update that view with ideas from computer science, biological signalling, and evolution.

Can we rely on Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” to lead markets to “the best” overall outcome? Darwin’s insights say no.  

Our unique capacities were created by a major transition in evolution, which built a need for teamwork and inclusive economics deep into our nature. But many economists — quite unnaturally — exclude its logic from their ideas. 

Division of labor creates a need for others. And it logically connects your interests with the interests of those needed others (which complicates evolutionary trade-offs). 

Each day, each of us faces 500 billion opportunities for genetic civil war to break out. Thankfully we’ve also evolved good ways to police and suppress these rogue parts, their mutinous mutations, and their declarations of independence.     

Evolution can be seen as a process of discovering logic that works well in a particular environment. But evolution can’t see what our foresight can grasp. In some cases the logic inherent in relationships of need (e.g. within groups) can be decisive. 

Many believe that evolution plays only ruthless “red in tooth and claw” games. But that view tends to ignore that nature is teeming with unseen or underappreciated teamwork. 

The word “rational” needs to be rescued. Tom Stoppard’s new play shows that a major rational parable, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, is widely misinterpreted. Seeing why “rationalists” do worse than Christians can help us avoid losing in evolution’s “negative telos” games.   

And what it means if we don’t see gravitational waves from inflation in the next 5–10 years. “The paradigm of physics — with its interplay of data, theory and prediction — is the most powerful […]

After more than two years, we’ve visited all 110 objects. Have a look back at each one! “If you keep your eyes open enough, oh, the stuff you will learn. […]

The Virgo Cluster of galaxies is the richest nearby treasure trove of ellipticals; this is the final one Messier ever found. “We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, […]