As the human population has grown over recent decades, our profound impact on the entire planet has become starkly apparent. Increasing affluence has led to expectations of good-quality health care, full employment, and the ability to live in cities that are safe, affordable, and clean. Yet these advantages for some come at a cost to others and to the planet itself. Human activities have led to a warming climate, massive landscape conversion, pollution, depletion of natural resources (crucially, fresh water and soil), defaunation, and loss of biodiversity. Today, global human society stands at a decision point. Business-as-usual approaches are likely to lead to catastrophic changes to our planet and our health and well-being. What will it take for universal recognition of our perilous position, and how can we begin to make the often-difficult changes required to live in a more sustainable, cooperative, and compassionate way? In this special series, we call attention to these choices and explore some of the possible routes to a more sustainable future.

Source: science.sciencemag.org

Three billion years ago, more or less, life crossed a threshold and began moving toward a multicellular existence. Evidence from multiple directions is showing how this hard-to-fathom leap might have been less difficult than once believed. The evolutionary histories of some groups of organisms record numerous transitions from single-celled to multicellular forms, suggesting the hurdles could not have been so high. Genetic comparisons between simple multicellular organisms and their single-celled relatives have revealed that much of the molecular equipment needed for cells to band together and coordinate their activities may have been in place well before multicellularity evolved. And clever experiments have shown that in the test tube, single-celled life can evolve the beginnings of multicellularity in just a few hundred generations—an evolutionary instant. The end result: the incredible diversity of life seen today.

The power of many
Elizabeth Pennisi
Science  29 Jun 2018:
Vol. 360, Issue 6396, pp. 1388-1391
DOI: 10.1126/science.360.6396.1388

Source: science.sciencemag.org

In the post year 2000 era the technologies that facilitate human communication have rapidly multiplied. While the adoption of these technologies has hugely impacted the behaviour and sociality of people, specifically in urban but also in rural environments, their "digital footprints" on different data bases have become an active area of research. The existence and accessibility of such large population-level datasets, has allowed scientists to study and model innate human tendencies and social patterns in an unprecedented way that complements traditional research approaches like questionnaire studies. In this review we focus on data analytics and modelling research – we call Social Physics – as it has been carried out using the mobile phone data sets to get insight into the various aspects of human sociality, burstiness in communication, mobility patterns, and daily rhythms.

Social Physics: Uncovering Human Behaviour from Communication
Kunal Bhattacharya, Kimmo Kaski

Source: arxiv.org