Felipe Xavier Costa, Jordan C. Rozum, Austin M. Marcus, and Luis M. Rocha

Entropy 2023, 25(2), 374

Biomolecular network dynamics are thought to operate near the critical boundary between ordered and disordered regimes, where large perturbations to a small set of elements neither die out nor spread on average. A biomolecular automaton (e.g., gene, protein) typically has high regulatory redundancy, where small subsets of regulators determine activation via collective canalization. Previous work has shown that effective connectivity, a measure of collective canalization, leads to improved dynamical regime prediction for homogeneous automata networks. We expand this by (i) studying random Boolean networks (RBNs) with heterogeneous in-degree distributions, (ii) considering additional experimentally validated automata network models of biomolecular processes, and (iii) considering new measures of heterogeneity in automata network logic. We found that effective connectivity improves dynamical regime prediction in the models considered; in RBNs, combining effective connectivity with bias entropy further improves the prediction. Our work yields a new understanding of criticality in biomolecular networks that accounts for collective canalization, redundancy, and heterogeneity in the connectivity and logic of their automata models. The strong link we demonstrate between criticality and regulatory redundancy provides a means to modulate the dynamical regime of biochemical networks.

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Venverloo T, Duarte F, Benson T, Leoni P, Hoogendoorn S, Ratti C (2023) Tracking stolen bikes in Amsterdam. PLoS ONE 18(2): e0279906.

Crime has major influences in urban life, from migration and mobility patterns, to housing prices and neighborhood liveability. However, urban crime studies still largely rely on static data reported by the various institutions and organizations dedicated to urban safety. In this paper, we demonstrate how the use of digital technologies enables the fine-grained analysis of specific crimes over time and space. This paper leverages the rise of ubiquitous sensing to investigate the issue of bike theft in Amsterdam—a city with a dominant cycling culture, where reportedly more than 80,000 bikes are stolen every year. We use active location tracking to unveil where stolen bikes travel to and what their temporal patterns are. This is the first study using tracking technologies to focus on two critical aspects of contemporary cities: active mobility and urban crime.

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Richard Creath 

Theory in Biosciences volume 142, pages61–66 (2023)

There is an old attempt to divide the sciences into sciences of laws and the historical sciences. More recently, John Beatty has drawn the distinction so that biology is a historical science and urged that there are no genuinely biological laws. This paper shows that there are indeed biological laws, specifically statistical ones, notably in evolutionary theory. Moreover, all or almost all other areas of biology involve laws as well. Even history involves laws. Finally, the paper shows that this pervasiveness of laws is compatible with the most basic commitments of those who, like Beatty, would claim that biology is only historical.

Read the full article at: link.springer.com