People are exceptionally rational, no other species are able to complete the tasks people are able to. But the people are also appear to be unique in a sense that they tend to make mistakes. Same silly mistakes over and over again. Is this error-proness a consequence of the rationality? Would assumingly less rational beings do the same mistakes? Laurie Santos (and her team) have conducted a series of experiments on the capuchin monkeys and have seen how the irrationality is also present in the monkey economics or "monkeynomics" for short. We invite you to listen her talk.

This talk was given at TED event and is available on ted.com.

It appears that computational history can be very realistic and scientifically plausible field of research. It somewhat reminds the legendary Civilization computer game, but explains what actually may contributed to the formation of the human societies. The essence of the Civilization game is a very simple one - the players must lead their civilizations to become a grand futuristic empire. As reported in the article linked below, the main result of the research is that the military technology and warfare is mostly responsible for the formation of the organized human societies. The first people faced a tough challenge - if they were not organized, they were simple wiped off.

In order to familiarize yourself more with the research done by Peter Turchin please visit the newscientist.com portal - see the "Real-world Civilisation game shows impact of war" article (by Hal Hodson).

Have you ever wondered how the human crowd works? Why a bunch of total strangers are able to interact in away, which forms interesting and long-living structures? How the appraently mindless animals are able to do the same? Insights to the question might be gained by listening to the talk "Swarm Intelliegence" by dr. Jens Krause at TEDx event in Gent, Belgium. Apparently the features of the crow behavior, and thus the research, is highly universal and therefore may enable understanding of the inner-workings of the human societies. Below you will a recording of this talk, which is made available on YouTube.

Physics of Risk is becoming more and more popular and gaining more attention from the media. This time our permanent contributor Aleksejus Kononovicius gave an interview to a journalist Marija Rudzevičiūtė from Bzn start. The original article was published in Lithuanian language, but here you can find its free form translation to English.

"Probably most of us were stuck in a traffic jam for at least once in our life. Some of us were certainly stuck in a traffic jam, though there were no car crash, no road works or no other apparent reason for the road to be jammed. Yet all cars move in a jerky motion - they suddenly accelerate, move a bit and then suddenly stop. The reason lies in a small errors made by the drivers themselves", everyday situation in a large city is reviewed by Aleksejus Kononovicius, younger research fellow at Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astronomy, Vilnius University. He is also a current contributor to the "Physics of Risk", a website which presents an idea that "more physics - less risk" for a broader society.

Another idea, which may be used to improve kinetic exchange models, might be the introduction of the many particle interactions. In the ideal gasses these interactions do not occur, but in the social systems they might have interesting consequences. Namely they might be used to explain why certain voting events (elections, referendums) yield unpredictable results.