Science News

By studying how pedestrians behave in crowds, European scientists are learning surprising things about human behavior. Westerners, for example, will usually step to the right to avoid an oncoming pedestrian. Individuals in Asia, however, tend to step to the left. Another tendency scientists have noticed is that clusters of three and four people naturally organize themselves into concave 'V' and 'U' shapes, with middle members falling back slightly. The formation makes it easier for individuals to talk with each other.

Crowdsourcing began as a legitimate tool to leverage the wisdom of the crowds to solve complex business and scientific challenges. Unfortunately, these very same techniques are increasingly being adopted by the criminal underground for nefarious purposes.

Science is driven forward by discovery, and we appear to stand at the beginning of a democratization of discovery. An ordinary person can be the one who realizes that a long arm of a protein probably tucks itself just so; a woman who never went to college can provide the crucial transcription that reveals a spidery script to be a love poem from 2,000 years in the past. Nobody can say where the movement will go, but among the new pioneers of crowd science, there is a palpable sense that they have just happened upon a powerful, poorly understood new resource.