Depending on your age, the word troll might evoke a nasty creature who lives under a bridge — or a nasty creature who posts inflammatory comments online. The former, found mostly in Scandinavian folktales, is typically a dim-witted beast, not inclined to help humans. The latter (judgment on wits aside) is also rarely considered helpful. But new research suggests a more nefarious role for these postmodern trolls: Their uncivil, rancorous remarks can influence how readers perceive science. Social scientists have long studied how and whether argumentative, obnoxious talk may influence peop...

In olden days, before the Star Trek holodeck and movies like TRON and The Matrix, philosophers used to wonder whether life was but a dream. Nowadays they’re more concerned that reality could be just a computer simulation. Sure, that’s not very likely. But you can’t rule out the possibility. Computers simulate all sorts of things, and some scientists have seriously suggested that nature’s supposedly rock-solid reality is really just some smart alien teenager’s science fair project. Most people respond to that suggestion with a shrug. What does it matter? You have to row, row, row yo...

A computer program can get supplies to disaster areas efficiently even when the transportation system is part of the problem.

Insect's nerve cell development is a model of efficiency for sensing networks. (p. 13)

Today’s media landscape is unsettled ground, still shifting in the aftermath of that earthquake called the Internet. The proverbial kingdom and the power aren’t as much about how many doorsteps feel the thud of a daily paper as about page views, click-throughs, diggs and tweets. But the Gray Lady and her peers are hanging on. A new analysis of which media outlets wield the most influence in the internet community finds that many of the “legacy” media still have pull. Computer scientists Daniel Romero from Cornell and Wojciech Galuba from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ...

Quality of followers, not quantity, determines which tweets will fly