Almost everyone naturally turns left when walking – and we still have no idea why

By Iñaki Echeverría Huarte, Assistant Professor, Universidad de Navarra
Angel Garcimartín Montero, Catedrático de Física de la Materia Condensada, Universidad de Navarra
Iker Zuriguel Ballaz, Professor of Applied Physics, Universidad de Navarra

This story began, like so many in the history of science, with something we were not looking for.

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we were studying a practical question: how do people move around in an enclosed space when you ask them to keep apart from one another? Watching the footage time after time, we noticed something odd: almost every participant walked in loops that turned in the same direction, always anticlockwise. Stranger still, none of them seemed to have noticed they were doing it.

That…

Read complete article

~	From equations to Instagram feeds: how ‘algorithm’ changed its meaning

~	Cities across the world are sinking because of groundwater depletion. But the process can be reversed

~	Politics with Michelle Grattan: Tim Wilson says government is borrowing from the future to spend today

~	The dawn of the age of the exoskeleton

~	How should England pay for social care? Germany, Norway and Sweden take very different routes

~	Soheila Sokhanvari’s painstaking miniatures memorialise the stolen lives of Iranian cultural icons

~	Dark kitchens are popping up everywhere, but what are they and why does it matter?

~	Celebrity Traitors: research suggests that the likes of Bella Ramsey and James Blunt will find the game tougher than it looks

~	Who can speak on behalf of the people? The new frontiers of protest in the Sahel

~	New Greens leader David Shoebridge declares Greens ‘here to replace’ Labor