Matteo Chinazzi, Jessica T. Davis, Marco Ajelli, Corrado Gioannini, Maria Litvinova, Stefano Merler, View ORCID ProfileAna Pastore y Piontti, Luca Rossi, Kaiyuan Sun, Cécile Viboud, Xinyue Xiong, Hongjie Yu, M. Elizabeth Halloran, Ira M. Longini Jr., Alessandro Vespignani

 

Motivated by the rapid spread of a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Mainland China, we use a global metapopulation disease transmission model to project the impact of both domestic and international travel limitations on the national and international spread of the epidemic. The model is calibrated on the evidence of internationally imported cases before the implementation of the travel quarantine of Wuhan. By assuming a generation time of 7.5 days, the reproduction number is estimated to be 2.4 [90% CI 2.2-2.6]. The median estimate for number of cases before the travel ban implementation on January 23, 2020 is 58,956 [90% CI 40,759 – 87,471] in Wuhan and 3,491 [90% CI 1,924 – 7,360] in other locations in Mainland China. The model shows that as of January 23, most Chinese cities had already received a considerable number of infected cases, and the travel quarantine delays the overall epidemic progression by only 3 to 5 days. The travel quarantine has a more marked effect at the international scale, where we estimate the number of case importations to be reduced by 80% until the end of February. Modeling results also indicate that sustained 90% travel restrictions to and from Mainland China only modestly affect the epidemic trajectory unless combined with a 50% or higher reduction of transmission in the community.

Source: www.medrxiv.org

Doyne Farmer, Fotini Markopoulou, Eric Beinhocker & Steen Rasmussen

 

Our world is a system, in which physical and social technologies co-evolve. How can we shape a process we don’t control?

Source: aeon.co

Aridity, which is increasing worldwide because of climate change, affects the structure and functioning of dryland ecosystems. Whether aridification leads to gradual (versus abrupt) and systemic (versus specific) ecosystem changes is largely unknown. We investigated how 20 structural and functional ecosystem attributes respond to aridity in global drylands. Aridification led to systemic and abrupt changes in multiple ecosystem attributes. These changes occurred sequentially in three phases characterized by abrupt decays in plant productivity, soil fertility, and plant cover and richness at aridity values of 0.54, 0.7, and 0.8, respectively. More than 20% of the terrestrial surface will cross one or several of these thresholds by 2100, which calls for immediate actions to minimize the negative impacts of aridification on essential ecosystem services for the more than 2 billion people living in drylands.

Source: science.sciencemag.org

Nicolas Cambier, Roman Miletitch, Vincent Frémont, Marco Dorigo, Eliseo Ferrante and Vito Trianni

 

While direct local communication is very important for the organization of robot swarms, so far it has mostly been used for relatively simple tasks such as signaling robots preferences or states. Inspired by the emergence of meaning found in natural languages, more complex communication skills could allow robot swarms to tackle novel situations in ways that may not be a priori obvious to the experimenter. This would pave the way for the design of robot swarms with higher autonomy and adaptivity. The state of the art regarding the emergence of communication for robot swarms has mostly focused on offline evolutionary approaches, which showed that signaling and communication can emerge spontaneously even when not explicitly promoted. However, these approaches do not lead to complex, language-like communication skills, and signals are tightly linked to environmental and/or sensory-motor states that are specific to the task for which communication was evolved. To move beyond current practice, we advocate an approach to emergent communication in robot swarms based on language games. Thanks to language games, previous studies showed that cultural self-organization—rather than biological evolution—can be responsible for the complexity and expressive power of language. We suggest that swarm robotics can be an ideal test-bed to advance research on the emergence of language-like communication. The latter can be key to provide robot swarms with additional skills to support self-organization and adaptivity, enabling the design of more complex collective behaviors.

Source: www.frontiersin.org