The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016 to Jean-Pierre Sauvage University of Strasbourg, France, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA, and Bernard L. Feringa University of Groningen, the Netherlands “for the design and synthesis of molecular machines“

They developed the world’s smallest machines
A tiny lift, artificial muscles and miniscule motors. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016 is awarded to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa for their design and production of molecular machines. They have developed molecules with controllable movements, which can perform a task when energy is added.

The development of computing demonstrates how the miniaturisation of technology can lead to a revolution. The 2016 Nobel Laureates in Chemistry have miniaturised machines and taken chemistry to a new dimension.

Source: www.nobelprize.org

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2016 with one half to David J. Thouless
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA and the other half to
F. Duncan M. Haldane Princeton University, NJ, USA and J. Michael Kosterlitz Brown University, Providence, RI, USA ”for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter”

 

They revealed the secrets of exotic matter
This year’s Laureates opened the door on an unknown world where matter can assume strange states. They have used advanced mathematical methods to study unusual phases, or states, of matter, such as superconductors, superfluids or thin magnetic films. Thanks to their pioneering work, the hunt is now on for new and exotic phases of matter. Many people are hopeful of future applications in both materials science and electronics.

Source: www.nobelprize.org

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy.

This year’s Nobel Laureate discovered and elucidated mechanisms underlying autophagy, a fundamental process for degrading and recycling cellular components.  

The word autophagy originates from the Greek words auto-, meaning “self”, and phagein, meaning “to eat”. Thus,autophagy denotes “self eating”. This concept emerged during the 1960’s, when researchers first observed that the cell could destroy its own contents by enclosing it in membranes, forming sack-like vesicles that were transported to a recycling compartment, called the lysosome, for degradation. Difficulties in studying the phenomenon meant that little was known until, in a series of brilliant experiments in the early 1990’s, Yoshinori Ohsumi used baker’s yeast to identify genes essential for autophagy. He then went on to elucidate the underlying mechanisms for autophagy in yeast and showed that similar sophisticated machinery is used in our cells.

Source: www.nobelprize.org

The Flagship Conference of the Complex Systems Society will take place on September 19-22 in Amsterdam. See details at http://www.ccs2016.org

 

Attendants are encouraged to tweet relevant moments using the hashtag #CCS17

 

If you cannot make it to Amsterdam, follow the live tweetcast from https://twitter.com/search?q=%23CCS16

 

We will also be tweeting and retweeting from https://twitter.com/cxdig

Source: mobile.twitter.com

In order to keep their cohesiveness during locomotion gregarious animals must make collective decisions. Many species boast complex societies with multiple levels of communities. A common case is when two dominant levels exist, one corresponding to leaders and the other consisting of followers. In this paper we study the collective motion of such two-level assemblies of self-propelled particles. We present a model adapted from one originally proposed to describe the movement of cells resulting in a smoothly varying coherent motion. We shall use the terminology corresponding to large groups of some mammals where leaders and followers form a group called a harem. We study the emergence (self-organization) of sub-groups within a herd during locomotion by computer simulations. The resulting processes are compared with our prior observations of a Przewalski horse herd (Hortob\’agy, Hungary) which we use as results from a published case study. We find that the model reproduces key features of a herd composed of harems moving on open ground, including fights for followers between leaders and bachelor groups (group of leaders without followers). One of our findings, however, does not agree with the observations. While in our model the emerging group size distribution is normal, the group size distribution of the observed herd based on historical data have been found to follow lognormal distribution. We argue that this indicates that the formation (and the size) of the harems must involve a more complex social topology than simple spatial-distance based interactions.

 

Collective motion of groups of self-propelled particles following interacting leaders
Bence Ferdinandy, Katalin Ozogány, Tamás Vicsek

http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03212

Source: arxiv.org