Where do we come from? Where are we going? New research from the Santa Fe Institute explores key questions related to humanity, society, and the existence of life in our world.

Part 1: The Principles of Complexity: Understanding the Hidden Sources of Order by Dr. Stefani Crabtree

Part 2: Autocatalytic Sets: Complexity at the Interface of Chemistry and Biology by Dr. Wim Hordijk

Part 3: Beyond Pairwise: Higher-Order Interactions in Complex Systems

Read the full article at: www.templeton.org

Gerardo Iñiguez, Carlos Pineda, Carlos Gershenson & Albert-László Barabási 

Nature Communications volume 13, Article number: 1646 (2022)

Virtually anything can be and is ranked; people, institutions, countries, words, genes. Rankings reduce complex systems to ordered lists, reflecting the ability of their elements to perform relevant functions, and are being used from socioeconomic policy to knowledge extraction. A century of research has found regularities when temporal rank data is aggregated. Far less is known, however, about how rankings change in time. Here we explore the dynamics of 30 rankings in natural, social, economic, and infrastructural systems, comprising millions of elements and timescales from minutes to centuries. We find that the flux of new elements determines the stability of a ranking: for high flux only the top of the list is stable, otherwise top and bottom are equally stable. We show that two basic mechanisms — displacement and replacement of elements — capture empirical ranking dynamics. The model uncovers two regimes of behavior; fast and large rank changes, or slow diffusion. Our results indicate that the balance between robustness and adaptability in ranked systems might be governed by simple random processes irrespective of system details.

Read the full article at: www.nature.com

Thanks to the power of fluctuation relations, physicists are taking the second law of thermodynamics to settings once thought impossible.

Read the full article at: www.quantamagazine.org

With self-generated gradients of chemicals and physical tension, cells in the body steer themselves to vital destinations.

Read the full article at: www.quantamagazine.org

Oscar Fontanelli, Plinio Guzmán, Amílcar Meneses, Alfredo Hernández, Marisol Flores-Garrido, Maribel Hernández-Rosales, Guillermo de Anda-Jáuregui
We present a collection of networks that describe the travel patterns between municipalities in Mexico between 2020 and 2021. Using anonymized mobile device geo-location data we constructed directed, weighted networks representing the (normalized) volume of travels between municipalities. We analysed changes in global (graph total weight sum), local (centrality measures), and mesoscale (community structure) network features. We observe that changes in these features are associated with factors such as Covid-19 restrictions and population size. In general, events in early 2020 (when initial Covid-19 restrictions were implemented) induced more intense changes in network features, whereas later events had a less notable impact in network features. We believe these networks will be useful for researchers and decision makers in the areas of transportation, infrastructure planning, epidemic control and network science at large.

Read the full article at: arxiv.org