Month: April 2025

The Hidden Order of Life: How Nature Breaks Symmetry with Nikta Fakhri


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Living systems are in constant motion, from the inner workings of our cells to the synchronized movements of bird flocks. What sets these systems apart is that they are powered by tiny, energy-consuming components that generate their own movement and forces. In this talk, I’ll uncover the hidden rules that govern this dynamic behavior and explore how breaking certain physical symmetries, like the familiar flow of time, allows life to organize itself in unexpected ways. I will show how these discoveries help us understand the intricate patterns inside cells, reveal surprising new properties of living materials, and offer a fresh perspective on the physics that shapes the natural world around us.

Nikta Fakhri is an associate Professor in the Department of Physics at MIT and Physics of Living Systems Group. She completed her undergraduate degree at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran and her PhD at Rice University, Houston, TX. She was a Human Frontier Science Program postdoctoral fellow at Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany before joining MIT. Nikta is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Physics. She is the recipient of the 2018 IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Biological Physics, the 2019 NSF CAREER Award, and the 2022 American Physical Society Early Career Award in Soft Matter Research.

Watch at: www.youtube.com

Mapping global value chains at the product level

Lea Karbevska & César A. Hidalgo 
EPJ Data Science volume 14, Article number: 21 (2025)

Value chain data is crucial for navigating economic disruptions. Yet, despite its importance, we lack publicly available product-level value chain datasets, since resources such as the “World Input-Output Database”, “Inter-Country Input-Output Tables”, “EXIOBASE”, and “EORA”, lack information about products (e.g. Radio Receivers, Telephones, Electrical Capacitors, LCDs, etc.) and instead rely on aggregate industrial sectors (e.g. Electrical Equipment, Telecommunications). Here, we introduce a method that leverages ideas from machine learning and trade theory to infer product-level value chain relationships from fine-grained international trade data. We apply our method to data summarizing the exports and imports of 1200+ products and 250+ world regions (e.g. states in the U.S., prefectures in Japan, etc.) to infer value chain information implicit in their trade patterns. In short, we leverage the idea that due to global value chains, regions specialized in the export of a product will tend to specialize in the import of its inputs. We use this idea to develop a novel proportional allocation model to estimate product-level trade flows between regions and countries. This contributes a method to approximate value chain data at the product level that should be of interest to people working in logistics, trade, and sustainable development.

Read the full article at: epjdatascience.springeropen.com

Meltdown of trust in weakly governed economies

Stephen Polasky, Marten Scheffer, and John M. Anderies

122 (14) e2320528122

A well-functioning society requires well-functioning institutions that ensure prosperity, fair distribution of wealth, social participation, security, and informative media. Such institutions are built on a foundation of trust. However, while trust is essential for economic success and good governance, interconnected mechanisms inherent in weakly governed market economies tend to undermine the very trust on which such success depends. These mechanisms include the intrinsic tendency for inequality to grow, media to boost perceived unfairness, and self-interest to gain rewards at the expense of others. These mechanisms, if left unchecked, allow wealth concentration to result in state capture where institutions facilitate further wealth concentration instead of the promoting the common good. As a result, people may become alienated and untrusting of fellow citizens and of institutions. Several democracies now experience such dynamics, the United States being a prime example. We discuss ways in which well-functioning democracies can design institutions to help avoid this social trap, and the much harder challenge of escaping the trap once in it. Successful cases such as the ability of Scandinavian democracies to maintain high-trust, and the US progressive era in the early 20th century provide instructive examples.

Read the full article at: www.pnas.org