The dendritic arms of some human neurons can perform logic operations that once seemed to require whole neural networks.

Source: www.quantamagazine.org

F. Molnar, T. Nishikawa, and A.E. Motter,
Nature Physics (2020), doi:10.1038/s41567-019-0742-y.

Symmetry breaking—the phenomenon in which the symmetry of a system is not inherited by its stable states—underlies pattern formation, superconductivity and numerous other effects. Recent theoretical work has established the possibility of converse symmetry breaking, a phenomenon in which the stable states are symmetric only when the system itself is not. This includes scenarios in which interacting entities are required to be non-identical in order to exhibit identical behaviour, such as in reaching consensus. Here we present an experimental demonstration of this phenomenon. Using a network of alternating-current electromechanical oscillators, we show that their ability to achieve identical frequency synchronization is enhanced when the oscillators are tuned to be suitably non-identical and that converse symmetry breaking persists for a range of noise levels. These results have implications for the optimization and control of network dynamics in a broad class of systems whose function benefits from harnessing uniform behaviour.

Source: www.nature.com

Sam Kriegman, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, and Josh Bongard
PNAS

 

Most technologies are made from steel, concrete, chemicals, and plastics, which degrade over time and can produce harmful ecological and health side effects. It would thus be useful to build technologies using self-renewing and biocompatible materials, of which the ideal candidates are living systems themselves. Thus, we here present a method that designs completely biological machines from the ground up: computers automatically design new machines in simulation, and the best designs are then built by combining together different biological tissues. This suggests others may use this approach to design a variety of living machines to safely deliver drugs inside the human body, help with environmental remediation, or further broaden our understanding of the diverse forms and functions life may adopt.

Source: www.pnas.org

Urban science seeks to understand the fundamental processes that drive, shape and sustain cities and urbanization. It is a multi/transdisciplinary approach involving concepts, methods and research from the social, natural, engineering and computational sciences, along with the humanities. This report is intended to convey the current “state of the art” in urban science while also clearly indicating how urban science builds upon and complements (but does not replace) prior work on cities and urbanization in many other disciplines. The report does not aim at a fully comprehensive synopsis of work done under the rubric of “urban science” but it does aim to convey what makes urban science different from discipline-based examinations of cities and urbanization. It also highlights novel insights generated by the inherently multidisciplinary inquiry that urban science exemplifies."

Source: www.colorado.edu

Evangelos Pournaras

 

Digital societies come with a design paradox: On the one hand, technologies, such as Internet of Things, pervasive and ubiquitous systems, allow a distributed local intelligence in interconnected devices of our everyday life such as smart phones, smart thermostats, self-driving cars, etc. On the other hand, Big Data collection and storage is managed in a highly centralized fashion, resulting in privacy-intrusion, surveillance actions, discriminatory and segregation social phenomena. What is the difference between a distributed and a decentralized system design? How "decentralized" is the processing of our data nowadays? Does centralized design undermine autonomy? Can the level of decentralization in the implemented technologies influence ethical and social dimensions, such as social justice? Can decentralization convey sustainability? Are there parallelisms between the decentralization of digital technology and the decentralization of urban development?

Source: arxiv.org