Nicholas A. Christakis

What role do social networks – and the precise nature and structure of social interactions – play in the production of public goods and in human welfare? What about social contagion? A thread on some of our #HNL experiments with many thousands of participants from 2010 to the present. 1/

There have been more measles cases in the US this year than any other since the disease was declared eliminated a quarter-century ago. cori.centerforhealthsecurity.org/resources/me...

The thing is, the Trump administration, in this matter and in others, knows it’s acting unlawfully. But the disruption and fear they cause is almost as effective as the attempted action itself.

Wow! For the first time ever, the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed an exoplanet by directly imaging it. The newfound world has a mass similar to Saturn and orbits inside the debris disk surrounding a very young star just 111 light years away. via @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Talking about collective behavior and emergence in humans and other animals with one of my favorite scientists, Iain Couzin, at the Max Planck Institute in Konstanz.

Since American gun violence is mostly “arguments with guns,” no wonder homicide trends are due mostly to changes in the number of arguments and the odds a given argument had a gun present.

Super cool research: spontaneous problem solving in bees. In humans, this is like being handed a hammer and nail for the first time: If you’ve never seen either, you’re lost. If you’ve only seen one, you’re still stuck. But knowing what both do separately, there’s a chance you can work it out.

None of us should any “longer tinker with the machinery of death.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/03/u...

Cool thread on cool new work regarding social contagion.

Inventive (albeit depressing) paper finds that there is a discernible spike in cryptocurrency activity around the time foreign aid money is disbursed. Roughly 2-6% of every dollar of World Bank foreign aid disbursements got siphoned off into crypto wallets.

When did colors appear in the biological world? And which came first, color vision or coloration? By >100M years, it was color vision first, then coloration of fruit, then flowers, then warning signals, then sexual signals. For sexual signals, coloration and color vision evolved simultaneously.

Postdoctoral Associate Position in Biosocial Science in the Human Nature Lab! We have a cutting edge research agenda in human social chemosignaling. Scientists with an interest in olfaction and AI or with experience in GC/MS or animal chemosignaling are especially encouraged. Please repost.

I felt on a roll here (back in 2019): Without academic freedom, we might never see the truth. Here’s why.

Around 81 percent of grades awarded at Yale College in the 2024-25 school year were either an A or an A-minus. This is absurd and subverts the importance of feedback and evaluation. yaledailynews.com/articles/a-a...