This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Walking in New York City is almost a competitive sport. And people in cities really do walk faster than their country counterparts.

2.8 feet per second faster according to a worldwide study in the 1970s but that speedier

pace of life extends to other aspects of city living too. There's more

inventions per capita in large cities or more mobile telephony usage in larger cities.

Love Varsna, an information theorist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He says you might expect Twitter use to increase in larger cities too, but after analyzing 2.5 million

tweets from 50 U.S. cities, his team concluded the opposite is true.

There's actually less tweeting per capita as population rises. But those who do

tweet in big cities are more prolific, tweeting more often on average than

their small town counterparts. And so what we discovered is that there's kind of a core of people that we call town tweeters

that seem to emerge.

And those people are actually tweeting a lot and then everyone else is not tweeting very

much in large cities.

And so those what we call town tweeters

are essentially serving as an information broadcast infrastructure.

Their analysis is in the journal Sage Open. Of course, the faster pace of life in big cities also means that these days,

lots of people text and tweet while they're walking.

In a 2018 remake of Midnight Cowboy,

maybe a more accurate line for Razzo Rizzo would be,

Hey, I'm tweeting here.

Thanks for listening.

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