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These three things—a biological hurricane, computational social science, and the rediscovery of experimentation—are going to change the social sciences in the 21st century. With that change will come, in my judgment, a variety of discoveries and opportunities that offer tremendous prospect for improving the human condition.
It's one thing to say that the way in which we study our object of inquiry, namely humans, is undergoing profound change, as I think it is. The social sciences are indeed changing. But the next question is: is the object of inquiry also undergoing profound change? It's not just how we study it that's changing, which it is. The question is: is the thing itself, our humanity, also changing?

Living Data contributes to the 2012 Antarctic Treaty meeting in Hobart, 11-17 June. Words are by Lisa Roberts, Sue Anderson and Steve Nicol. Thanks to Tony Press (CCAMLR), Andrew Constable and Graham Hosie (AAD).

Brain networks may avoid traffic jams at their busiest intersections by communicating on different frequencies, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the University Medical Center at Hamburg-Eppendorf and the University of Tübingen have learned.

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Researchers at the University of Cambridge have developed a simple mathematical model of the brain which provides a remarkably complete statistical account of the complex web of connections between various brain regions.

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Having attractive friends will make you more popular on Facebook, especially if you are a woman, according to a new study that takes Charles Darwin into the domain of cyber networking.

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Queen's University professor Selim Akl has provided additional proof to the theory that nature computes.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.” - Albert Einstein

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Himelboim found out that as the discussion group be­came larger, just like in offline life, they also became more hierarchical. People exhibit what’s called a preferential at­tachment toward those with many con­nections, which suggests that having many connections makes it easier to make more connections. For those hav­ing fewer connections, making new con­nections will be more difficult. Hence, the internet seems to foster inequality.

"This model is inspired by the brain," she says. "It is a mathematical formulation of the brain's neural networks with their adaptive abilities." The authors show that when the model is installed in an environment offering constant sensory stimuli like the real world, and when all stimulus-response pairs are considered over the machine's lifetime, the Super Turing model yields an exponentially greater repertoire of behaviors than the classical computer or Turing model. They demonstrate that the Super-Turing model is superior for human-like tasks and learning.

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Human interactions follow the network pattern of life itself...