Last Updated on March 16, 2026 by Daily News Staff

Celeste Kidd, University of California, Berkeley

I’m in a coffee shop when a young child dumps out his mother’s bag in search of fruit snacks. The contents spill onto the table, bench and floor. It’s a chaotic – but functional – solution to the problem.

Children have a penchant for unconventional thinking that, at first glance, can look disordered. This kind of apparently chaotic behavior served as the inspiration for developmental psychologist Jean Piaget’s best-known theory: that children construct their knowledge through experience and must pass through four sequential stages, the first two of which lack the ability to use structured logic.

Piaget remains the GOAT of developmental psychology. He fundamentally and forever changed the world’s view of children by showing that kids do not enter the world with the same conceptual building blocks as adults, but must construct them through experience. No one before or since has amassed such a catalog of quirky child behaviors that researchers even today can replicate within individual children.

While Piaget was certainly correct in observing that children engage in a host of unusual behaviors, my lab recently uncovered evidence that upends some long-standing assumptions about the limits of children’s logical capabilities that originated with his work. Our new paper in the journal Nature Human Behaviour describes how young children are capable of finding systematic solutions to complex problems without any instruction. https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qb4TPj1pxzQ?wmode=transparent&start=0 Jean Piaget describes how children of different ages tackle a sorting task, with varying success.

Putting things in order

Throughout the 1960s, Piaget observed that young children rely on clunky trial-and-error methods rather than systematic strategies when attempting to order objects according to some continuous quantitative dimension, like length. For instance, a 4-year-old child asked to organize sticks from shortest to longest will move them around randomly and usually not achieve the desired final order.

Psychologists have interpreted young children’s inefficient behavior in this kind of ordering task – what we call a seriation task – as an indicator that kids can’t use systematic strategies in problem-solving until at least age 7.

Somewhat counterintuitively, my colleagues and I found that increasing the difficulty and cognitive demands of the seriation task actually prompted young children to discover and use algorithmic solutions to solve it.

Piaget’s classic study asked children to put some visible items like wooden sticks in order by height. Huiwen Alex Yang, a psychology Ph.D. candidate who works on computational models of learning in my lab, cranked up the difficulty for our version of the task. With advice from our collaborator Bill Thompson, Yang designed a computer game that required children to use feedback clues to infer the height order of items hidden behind a wall, .

The game asked children to order bunnylike creatures from shortest to tallest by clicking on their sneakers to swap their places. The creatures only changed places if they were in the wrong order; otherwise they stayed put. Because they could only see the bunnies’ shoes and not their heights, children had to rely on logical inference rather than direct observation to solve the task. Yang tested 123 children between the ages of 4 and 10. https://www.youtube.com/embed/GlsbcE6nOxk?wmode=transparent&start=0 Researcher Huiwen Alex Yang tests 8-year-old Miro on the bunny sorting task. The bunnies are hidden behind a wall with only their sneakers visible. Miro’s selections exemplify use of selection sort, a classic efficient sorting algorithm from computer science. Kidd Lab at UC Berkeley.

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Figuring out a strategy

We found that children independently discovered and applied at least two well-known sorting algorithms. These strategies – called selection sort and shaker sort – are typically studied in computer science.

More than half the children we tested demonstrated evidence of structured algorithmic thinking, and at ages as young as 4 years old. While older kids were more likely to use algorithmic strategies, our finding contrasts with Piaget’s belief that children were incapable of this kind of systematic strategizing before 7 years of age. He thought kids needed to reach what he called the concrete operational stage of development first.

Our results suggest that children are actually capable of spontaneous logical strategy discovery much earlier when circumstances require it. In our task, a trial-and-error strategy could not work because the objects to be ordered were not directly observable; children could not rely on perceptual feedback.

Explaining our results requires a more nuanced interpretation of Piaget’s original data. While children may still favor apparently less logical solutions to problems during the first two Piagetian stages, it’s not because they are incapable of doing otherwise if the situation requires it.

A systematic approach to life

Algorithmic thinking is crucial not only in high-level math classes, but also in everyday life. Imagine that you need to bake two dozen cookies, but your go-to recipe yields only one. You could go through all the steps of making the recipe twice, washing the bowl in between, but you’d never do that because you know that would be inefficient. Instead, you’d double the ingredients and perform each step only once. Algorithmic thinking allows you to identify a systematic way of approaching the need for twice as many cookies that improves the efficiency of your baking.

Algorithmic thinking is an important capacity that’s useful to children as they learn to move and operate in the world – and we now know they have access to these abilities far earlier than psychologists had believed.

That children can engage with algorithmic thinking before formal instruction has important implications for STEM – science, technology, engineering and math –education. Caregivers and educators now need to reconsider when and how they give children the opportunity to tackle more abstract problems and concepts. Knowing that children’s minds are ready for structured problems as early as preschool means we can nurture these abilities earlier in support of stronger math and computational skills.

And have some patience next time you encounter children interacting with the world in ways that are perhaps not super convenient. As you pick up your belongings from a café floor, remember that it’s all part of how children construct their knowledge. Those seemingly chaotic kids are on their way to more obviously logical behavior soon.

Celeste Kidd, Professor of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Downtown Phoenix experienced the thunder of Formula 1 engines once again on Saturday, March 14, 2026, when the Red Bull Showrun transformed East Jefferson Street into a temporary motorsports stage. The free public event drew large crowds eager to see a real Formula 1 car perform high-speed demonstrations through the heart of the city.

The star of the event was the legendary Red Bull RB7, one of the most dominant machines in modern Formula 1 history. Fans watched as the car blasted down the temporary street course performing burnouts, donuts, and acceleration runs that echoed between downtown buildings.

A Championship Machine on City Streets

Originally driven to the 2011 Formula 1 World Championship by Sebastian Vettel, the RB7 represents a golden era for Red Bull Racing. The car is known for its aerodynamic design and remarkable performance during the 2011 season.

During the Phoenix showrun, the car was piloted by Scott Speed, a former Formula 1 competitor and experienced motorsports driver. He was joined by Nikola Tsolov, a rising talent in Red Bull’s junior driver development program.

Together, the drivers delivered a high-energy demonstration that gave spectators a rare opportunity to witness the power and precision of Formula 1 machinery up close.

A Tribute to Phoenix’s Formula 1 Legacy

The event also served as a reminder of Phoenix’s unique place in Formula 1 history. The city previously hosted the United States Grand Prix (Phoenix street circuit), which ran through downtown streets from 1989 through 1991.

During those races, fans watched legendary drivers such as Ayrton Senna compete on the challenging desert street circuit.

Although the Grand Prix eventually moved to other locations, the Red Bull Showrun brought the spirit of Formula 1 back to Phoenix for a new generation of motorsports fans.

Formula 1’s Growing U.S. Momentum

The Phoenix showrun comes at a time when Formula One is experiencing unprecedented growth in the United States. The sport now hosts three annual races in Austin, Miami, and Las Vegas.

Promotional events like the Red Bull Showrun help introduce the sport to new audiences and reconnect cities with their racing heritage.

For longtime Phoenix residents, the sound of a Formula 1 engine echoing through downtown streets was more than just a spectacle—it was a powerful reminder of the city’s motorsports past and the growing popularity of Formula 1 across America. 🏎️🔥

Related External Coverage

• Official Red Bull Showrun Phoenix Event Page
• Arizona’s Family (3TV / CBS 5): Coverage of the Red Bull Showrun in Downtown Phoenix
• Formula 1 Official Website – Learn More About the Sport
• City of Phoenix – Downtown Events and Street Closures
• History of the Phoenix Street Circuit and the U.S. Grand Prix (1989–1991)

Stay updated with the latest automotive news, vehicle technology, industry trends, and transportation innovations. The STM Daily News Automotive section explores how cars, electric vehicles, and mobility solutions are shaping the future of the road.

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Last Updated on March 15, 2026 by Daily News Staff

First contact with aliens could end in colonization and genocide if we don’t learn from history

David Delgado Shorter, University of California, Los Angeles; Kim TallBear, University of Alberta, and William Lempert, Bowdoin College

We’re only halfway through 2023, and it feels already like the year of alien contact.

In February, President Joe Biden gave orders to shoot down three unidentified aerial phenomena – NASA’s title for UFOs. Then, the alleged leaked footage from a Navy pilot of a UFO, and then news of a whistleblower’s report on a possible U.S. government cover-up about UFO research. Most recently, an independent analysis published in June suggests that UFOs might have been collected by a clandestine agency of the U.S. government.

If any actual evidence of extraterrestrial life emerges, whether from whistleblower testimony or an admission of a cover-up, humans would face a historic paradigm shift.

As members of an Indigenous studies working group who were asked to lend our disciplinary expertise to a workshop affiliated with the Berkeley SETI Research Center, we have studied centuries of culture contacts and their outcomes from around the globe. Our collaborative preparations for the workshop drew from transdisciplinary research in Australia, New Zealand, Africa and across the Americas.

In its final form, our group statement illustrated the need for diverse perspectives on the ethics of listening for alien life and a broadening of what defines “intelligence” and “life.” Based on our findings, we consider first contact less as an event and more as a long process that has already begun.

Who’s in charge of first contact

The question of who is “in charge” of preparing for contact with alien life immediately comes to mind. The communities – and their interpretive lenses – most likely to engage in any contact scenario would be military, corporate and scientific.

By giving Americans the legal right to profit from space tourism and planetary resource extraction, the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 could mean that corporations will be the first to find signs of extraterrestrial societies. Otherwise, while detecting unidentified aerial phenomena is usually a military matter, and NASA takes the lead on sending messages from Earth, most activities around extraterrestrial communications and evidence fall to a program called SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

SETI is a collection of scientists with a variety of research endeavors, including Breakthrough Listen, which listens for “technosignatures,” or markers, like pollutants, of a designed technology.

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SETI investigators are virtually always STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – scholars. Few in the social science and humanities fields have been afforded opportunities to contribute to concepts of and preparations for contact.

In a promising act of disciplinary inclusion, the Berkeley SETI Research Center in 2018 invited working groups – including our Indigenous studies working group – from outside STEM fields to craft perspective papers for SETI scientists to consider.

Ethics of listening

Neither Breakthough Listen nor SETI’s site features a current statement of ethics beyond a commitment to transparency. Our working group was not the first to raise this issue. And while the SETI Institute and certain research centers have included ethics in their event programming, it seems relevant to ask who NASA and SETI answer to, and what ethical guidelines they’re following for a potential first contact scenario.

SETI’s Post-Detection Hub – another rare exception to SETI’s STEM-centrism – seems the most likely to develop a range of contact scenarios. The possible circumstances imagined include finding ET artifacts, detecting signals from thousands of light years away, dealing with linguistic incompatibility, finding microbial organisms in space or on other planets, and biological contamination of either their or our species. Whether the U.S. government or heads of military would heed these scenarios is another matter.

SETI-affiliated scholars tend to reassure critics that the intentions of those listening for technosignatures are benevolent, since “what harm could come from simply listening?” The chair emeritus of SETI Research, Jill Tarter, defended listening because any ET civilization would perceive our listening techniques as immature or elementary.

But our working group drew upon the history of colonial contacts to show the dangers of thinking that whole civilizations are comparatively advanced or intelligent. For example, when Christopher Columbus and other European explorers came to the Americas, those relationships were shaped by the preconceived notion that the “Indians” were less advanced due to their lack of writing. This led to decades of Indigenous servitude in the Americas.

The working group statement also suggested that the act of listening is itself already within a “phase of contact.” Like colonialism itself, contact might best be thought of as a series of events that starts with planning, rather than a singular event. Seen this way, isn’t listening potentially without permission just another form of surveillance? To listen intently but indiscriminately seemed to our working group like a type of eavesdropping.

It seems contradictory that we begin our relations with aliens by listening in without their permission while actively working to stop other countries from listening to certain U.S. communications. If humans are initially perceived as disrespectful or careless, ET contact could more likely lead to their colonization of us.

Histories of contact

Throughout histories of Western colonization, even in those few cases when contactees were intended to be protected, contact has led to brutal violence, pandemics, enslavement and genocide.

James Cook’s 1768 voyage on the HMS Endeavor was initiated by the Royal Society. This prestigious British academic society charged him with calculating the solar distance between the Earth and the Sun by measuring the visible movement of Venus across the Sun from Tahiti. The society strictly forbade him from any colonial engagements.

Though he achieved his scientific goals, Cook also received orders from the Crown to map and claim as much territory as possible on the return voyage. Cook’s actions put into motion wide-scale colonization and Indigenous dispossession across Oceania, including the violent conquests of Australia and New Zealand.

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The Royal Society gave Cook a “prime directive” of doing no harm and to only conduct research that would broadly benefit humanity. However, explorers are rarely independent from their funders, and their explorations reflect the political contexts of their time.

As scholars attuned to both research ethics and histories of colonialism, we wrote about Cook in our working group statement to showcase why SETI might want to explicitly disentangle their intentions from those of corporations, the military and the government.

Although separated by vast time and space, both Cook’s voyage and SETI share key qualities, including their appeal to celestial science in the service of all humanity. They also share a mismatch between their ethical protocols and the likely long-term impacts of their success. https://www.youtube.com/embed/5gZwLGrJQrM?wmode=transparent&start=0 This BBC video describes the modern ramifications of Captain James Cook’s colonial legacy in New Zealand.

The initial domino of a public ET message, or recovered bodies or ships, could initiate cascading events, including military actions, corporate resource mining and perhaps even geopolitical reorganizing. The history of imperialism and colonialism on Earth illustrates that not everyone benefits from colonization. No one can know for sure how engagement with extraterrestrials would go, though it’s better to consider cautionary tales from Earth’s own history sooner rather than later.

This article has been updated to correct the date of James Cook’s voyage.

David Delgado Shorter, Professor of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, University of California, Los Angeles; Kim TallBear, Professor of Native Studies, University of Alberta, and William Lempert, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Bowdoin College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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