Ximena Dávila Yáñez and Humberto Maturana Romesín

Adaptive Behavior 31(5)

More than 20 years ago, Humberto Maturana and Ximena Dávila initiated a research program on the nature of human coexistence within the framework of molecular-autopoietic systems and the understanding of the organism-niche ecological dynamic unit (UDEON). In this article, we focus on the potential of conversation and reflection of living beings as transformative and liberating practices in the configuration of intimate feelings that define at every moment their emotional-relational operation as a totality in the understanding of the worlds they generate. We refer to the main contributions of cultural-biology which invite us to a journey through the nature of knowing, of human pain and suffering, of languaging, conversation, and reflection as cultural-biology beings.

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R. Maria del Rio-Chanona, Alejandro Hermida-Carrillo, Melody Sepahpour-Fard, Luning Sun, Renata Topinkova & Ljubica Nedelkoska
EPJ Data Science volume 12, Article number: 49 (2023)

To study the causes of the 2021 Great Resignation, we use text analysis and investigate the changes in work- and quit-related posts between 2018 and 2021 on Reddit. We find that the Reddit discourse evolution resembles the dynamics of the U.S. quit and layoff rates. Furthermore, when the COVID-19 pandemic started, conversations related to working from home, switching jobs, work-related distress, and mental health increased, while discussions on commuting or moving for a job decreased. We distinguish between general work-related and specific quit-related discourse changes using a difference-in-differences method. Our main finding is that mental health and work-related distress topics disproportionally increased among quit-related posts since the onset of the pandemic, likely contributing to the quits of the Great Resignation. Along with better labor market conditions, some relief came beginning-to-mid-2021 when these concerns decreased. Our study underscores the importance of having access to data from online forums, such as Reddit, to study emerging economic phenomena in real time, providing a valuable supplement to traditional labor market surveys and administrative data.

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Michael L. Wong , et al.

PNAS 120 (43) e2310223120

The universe is replete with complex evolving systems, but the existing macroscopic physical laws do not seem to adequately describe these systems. Recognizing that the identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature, we approach a potential “missing law” by looking for equivalencies among evolving systems. We suggest that all evolving systems—including but not limited to life—are composed of diverse components that can combine into configurational states that are then selected for or against based on function. We then identify the fundamental sources of selection—static persistence, dynamic persistence, and novelty generation—and propose a time-asymmetric law that states that the functional information of a system will increase over time when subjected to selection for function(s).

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Kevin Simpson, Alfredo L’Homme, Juan Keymer & Fernán Federici

BMC Biology

Background
Understanding how spatial patterns of gene expression emerge from the interaction of individual gene networks is a fundamental challenge in biology. Developing a synthetic experimental system with a common theoretical framework that captures the emergence of short- and long-range spatial correlations (and anti-correlations) from interacting gene networks could serve to uncover generic scaling properties of these ubiquitous phenomena.

Results
Here, we combine synthetic biology, statistical mechanics models, and computational simulations to study the spatial behavior of synthetic gene networks (SGNs) in Escherichia coli quasi-2D colonies growing on hard agar surfaces. Guided by the combined mechanisms of the contact process lattice simulation and two-dimensional Ising model (CPIM), we describe the spatial behavior of bi-stable and chemically coupled SGNs that self-organize into patterns of long-range correlations with power-law scaling or short-range anti-correlations. These patterns, resembling ferromagnetic and anti-ferromagnetic configurations of the Ising model near critical points, maintain their scaling properties upon changes in growth rate and cell shape.

Conclusions
Our findings shed light on the spatial biology of coupled and bistable gene networks in growing cell populations. This emergent spatial behavior could provide insights into the study and engineering of self-organizing gene patterns in eukaryotic tissues and bacterial consortia.

Read the full article at: bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com