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 that may be used to improve kinetic exchange models is the introduction of many-particle interactions. In the ideal gasses, these interactions do not occur, but in the social systems, they might have interesting consequences.

Originally I have written this article back in the end of 2013 and submitted it to a pop-science article contest organized by three locally well-known pop-science blogs "Mokslo sriuba" (en. Science soup; online pop-science web-show), technologijos.lt (edit: currently defunct general science news portal) and konstanta.lt (en. constant; very popular blog dedicated to astronomy and astrophysics). The article was rather successful and won the scientific jury prize in the contest!

Now, after the contest has ended, I can publish this article (and its English translation) on "Physics of Risk". So I invite you to read on!

Previously we wrote about the confrontation between the socialistic and capitalistic economic thought. We have looked into it from a point of view of elementary kinetic exchange models. While in our world, in the international context, we frequently hear about it via media, which tends to use it to explain the disagreements between China and USA or Russia and USA. Clearly those countries have different economical and political models, but are they the same as media tends to present them? We invite you to listen to two talks given by scientists (posted on ted.com) - one talk is about China's economical model, while the other is about China's political model.