Comment on This Week: New home sales, Facebook earns, GDP

Former Chicago Bears guard Nate Davis has placed his recently renovated, four-bedroom, 5,537-square-foot house on 1.28 acres in Highland Park on the market for $5 million. The often-injured Davis, 28, signed a three-year, $30 million deal with the Bears last year but was released from the team in November after he lost his starting role. Davis paid $2.3 million in May 2023 for the brick house, which was built in 2003 and designed by Evanston architect Michael Hershenson.

There is rarely time to write about every cool science paper that comes our way; many worthy candidates sadly fall through the cracks over the course of the year. But as 2024 comes to a close, we've gathered ten of our favorite such papers at the intersection of science and culture as a special treat, covering a broad range of topics: from reenacting Bronze Age spear combat and applying network theory to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, to Spider-Man inspired web-slinging tech and a mathematical connection between a turbulent phase transition and your morning cup of coffee.

We’d been chatting for the better part of two hours when Chris Kraft’s eyes suddenly brightened. “Hey,” he said, “Here’s a story I’ll bet you never heard.” Kraft, the man who had written flight rules for NASA at the dawn of US spaceflight and supervised the Apollo program, had invited me to his home south of Houston for one of our periodic talks about space policy and space history.

Value was in vogue in 2024. Shoppers and restaurant patrons in the U. S. were choosy about where and how to spend their money as they wrestled with high housing and food prices. Well-heeled customers traded down to Walmart and Aldi. Diners opted for fast food or home cooking instead of sit-down restaurants.

Whether it’s braving the long line at a trendy new restaurant or hanging on just a few minutes longer to see if there’s a post-credits scene after a movie, the decision to persevere or ditch it depends on specific regions of our brains. Waiting is not always about self-control. Deciding to wait (or not to wait) also involves gauging the value of the potential reward.

I'd describe myself as a skeptic of the generative AI revolution—I think the technology as it currently exists is situationally impressive and useful for specific kinds of tasks, but broadly oversold. I'm not sure it will vanish from relevance to quite the extent that other tech fads like the metaverse or NFTs did, but my suspicion is that companies like Nvidia and OpenAI are riding a bubble that will pop or deflate over time as more companies and individuals run up against the technology's limitations, and as it fails to advance as quickly or as impressively as its most ardent boosters are predicting. Maybe you agree with me and maybe you don't!