Ludéric Van Calck, Alexandre Pacheco, Volker Strobel, Marco Dorigo & Andreagiovanni Reina
Scientific Reports volume 13, Article number: 20417 (2023)

Robot swarms are generally considered to be composed of cooperative agents that, despite their limited individual capabilities, can perform difficult tasks by working together. However, in open swarms, where different robots can be added to the swarm by different parties with potentially competing interests, cooperation is but one of many strategies. We envision an information market where robots can buy and sell information through transactions stored on a distributed blockchain, and where cooperation is encouraged by the economy itself. As a proof of concept, we study a classical foraging task, where exchanging information with other robots is paramount to accomplish the task efficiently. We illustrate that even a single robot that lies to others—a so-called Byzantine robot—can heavily disrupt the swarm. Hence, we devise two protection mechanisms. Through an individual-level protection mechanism, robots are more sceptical about others’ information and can detect and discard Byzantine information, at the cost of lower efficiency. Through a systemic protection mechanism based on economic rules regulating robot interactions, robots that sell honest information acquire over time more wealth than Byzantines selling false information. Our simulations show that a well-designed robot economy penalises misinformation spreading and protects the swarm from Byzantine behaviour. We believe economics-inspired swarm robotics is a promising research direction that exploits the timely opportunity for decentralised economies offered by blockchain technology.

Read the full article at: www.nature.com

Takahiro Yabe, Bernardo Garcia Bulle Bueno, Morgan Frank, Alex Pentland, Esteban Moro

Urban economic resilience is intricately linked to how disruptions caused by pandemics, disasters, and technological shifts ripple through businesses and urban amenities. Disruptions, such as closures of non-essential businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, not only affect those places directly but also influence how people live and move, spreading the impact on other businesses and increasing the overall economic shock. However, it is unclear how much businesses depend on each other in these situations. Leveraging large-scale human mobility data and millions of same-day visits in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Dallas, we quantify dependencies between points-of-interest (POIs) encompassing businesses, stores, and amenities. Compared to places’ physical proximity, dependency networks computed from human mobility exhibit significantly higher rates of long-distance connections and biases towards specific pairs of POI categories. We show that using behavior-based dependency relationships improves the predictability of business resilience during shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, by around 40% compared to distance-based models. Simulating hypothetical urban shocks reveals that neglecting behavior-based dependencies can lead to a substantial underestimation of the spatial cascades of disruptions on businesses and urban amenities. Our findings underscore the importance of measuring the complex relationships woven through behavioral patterns in human mobility to foster urban economic resilience to shocks.

Read the full article at: arxiv.org

compiled and edited by Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, Timothy M. Waring and Vanessa P. Weinberger

PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B, BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
How did human societies evolve to become a major force of global change? What dynamics can lead societies on a trajectory of global sustainability? The astonishing growth in human population, economic activity, technological capacity and environmental impact – together known as the Anthropocene – has brought these questions to the fore. In this theme issue, we bring together the major elements of a theory of human evolution and sustainability on Earth. We show how diverse theories and approaches help to understand the past, present and future evolution of the Anthropocene, and discover new opportunities for moving towards sustainability. Collectively, the work provides the basis for an evolutionary synthesis of the human predicament on planet Earth.

Read the Special Issue at: royalsocietypublishing.org

The vulnerability of aging states: A survival analysis across premodern societies
Marten Scheffer, Egbert H. van Nes, Luke Kemp, Timothy A. Kohler, Timothy M. Lenton,  and Chi Xu

PNAS 120 (48) e2218834120

Humans become increasingly fragile as they age. We show that something similar may happen to states, although for states, the risk of termination levels off as they grow older, allowing some to persist for millennia. Proximate causes of their demise such as conquest, coups, earthquakes, and droughts are easy to spot and have received significant attention. However, our results suggest that unraveling what shapes resilience to such events is equally important if we are to understand state longevity and collapse. Risk of termination rises over the first 200 y, inviting a search for mechanisms that can undermine resilience at this timescale.

Read the full article at: www.pnas.org

Gizem Gumuskaya, Pranjal Srivastava, Ben G. Cooper, Hannah Lesser, Ben Semegran, Simon Garnier, Michael Levin

Advanced Science

Fundamental knowledge gaps exist about the plasticity of cells from adult soma and the potential diversity of body shape and behavior in living constructs derived from genetically wild-type cells. Here anthrobots are introduced, a spheroid-shaped multicellular biological robot (biobot) platform with diameters ranging from 30 to 500 microns and cilia-powered locomotive abilities. Each Anthrobot begins as a single cell, derived from the adult human lung, and self-constructs into a multicellular motile biobot after being cultured in extra cellular matrix for 2 weeks and transferred into a minimally viscous habitat. Anthrobots exhibit diverse behaviors with motility patterns ranging from tight loops to straight lines and speeds ranging from 5–50 microns s−1. The anatomical investigations reveal that this behavioral diversity is significantly correlated with their morphological diversity. Anthrobots can assume morphologies with fully polarized or wholly ciliated bodies and spherical or ellipsoidal shapes, each related to a distinct movement type. Anthrobots are found to be capable of traversing, and inducing rapid repair of scratches in, cultured human neural cell sheets in vitro. By controlling microenvironmental cues in bulk, novel structures, with new and unexpected behavior and biomedically-relevant capabilities, can be discovered in morphogenetic processes without direct genetic editing or manual sculpting.

Read the full article at: onlinelibrary.wiley.com