How complex should network models be? 🚨 In our latest paper we quantify (if and) when higher-order interactions are informative versus reducible to pairwise structure without losing functional signal (e.g., diffusion behavior). 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/

This thread responds to Prof. Christian Dunn’s Telegraph piece on #climate communication. I argue it misdiagnoses public disengagement, underplays escalating scientific risk, & reproduces a media narrative that has actively shaped, not merely reflected, public resistance to climate action 🧵

Ah, das ist sehr wichtig: Erstmals verhängt die EU-Kommission eine Geldbuße gegen eine Social-Media-Plattform aus den USA - und zwar wegen Verstößen gegen den Digital Services Act Elon Musks Plattform soll 120 Millionen Euro zahlen - wenn X nicht genügend nachjustiert, drohen weitere Strafen 🧵

Claude can't view full bluesky pages because they rely on javascript to render. So I built a little proxy to prerender pages so claude can see them! Just replace "bsky" with "hbsky" in the URL (The h is for html). Before vs after:

If anyone cares at all, EV battery recycling is now hitting 99% recovery for important metals Please remind me again what the recycle rate for fossil fuels is interestingengineering.com/energy/recyc...

The meat industry needed a new weapon. “Ultra-processed food” became the label of choice. Vague, meaningless, effective.

I mean cmon team

Agriculture causes up to a third of GHG emissions, yet 300+ ag lobbyists are pushing unproven ‘solutions’ at COP30. Efficiency alone won’t save us; we need radical food-system change. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

KTM Komuter vibes

95% hostile: "Murdoch’s TalkTV and Radio really outdid themselves on COP30 – 84 of 89 segments were hostile... So while some 97% of climate scientists agree it’s a crisis, 95% of Talk coverage insists its not worth fixing. How balanced!" Based on new research from @stopfundingheat.bsky.social

Vegetarisch zu leben ist Klimaschutz.

Misinformation research has a causality problem: lab experiments are limited; observational studies confounded. We used causal inference on 9.9M tweets, quantifying effects in the wild while blocking backdoor paths. Does misinfo get higher engagement? Are following discussions more emotional? 🧵

The remarkable thing about enshittification isn’t that it happens, but that people keep using the products. Ahem…Twitter.

A Spooky Unix story for Halloween. A new programmer accidentally ran “rm -rf *” as root, on one of the main computers at the University of Manchester.
 He stopped halfway, but /bin, /etc, /dev, and /lib were gone.
 What followed was one of the most insane live recoveries in computer history:

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

"these arrangements are not 'partnerships' or 'collaborations' but contracts that bring profit and publicity to AI firms, while making universities complicit in the continued empowerment of tech oligarchy and expansion of their 'AI Empire' (Tacheva and Ramasubramanian, 2023; Adams, 2024; Hao, 2025)"

Australia's state of Victoria has passed the country's first treaty with Indigenous peoples, a landmark act of recognition long denied to the nation's first inhabitants ➡️ u.afp.com/SegE

Is social media dying? How much has Twitter changed as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has transformed. Here are the key take-aways 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417

New research on 42 countries around the world shows that in most cases people generally do not believe the system they live under is fair. With one exception: China. I wrote a summary of this study and its methodology on Substack, which I'm posting in the reply.

DHS is the "gift" that keeps on "giving" and by that I mean a factory for white supremacist messaging. I got mad about the neomedievalism from last week, for @religiondispatches.org : religiondispatches.org/neomedievali...

How did rumors related to the peasant insurrections in revolutionary France (1789) spread? Researchers used epidemiological models to provide a quantitative answer, marking - to my knowledge - the first quantitative history paper that @nature.com has published www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Join us today at 1:30 PM on the 11th floor of NetSI or over zoom for a talk by Lin Chen, a new postdoctoral researcher in SunLAB. Don’t miss “Inequality and Resilience in Urban Social Dynamics” and the chance to connect with fellow researchers! www.networkscienceinstitute.org/talks/lin-chen

Call me a luddite if you like - but I don't want a bed that stops working when Amazon Web Services goes down. www.dexerto.com/entertainmen...

2. No, high environmental impact is not a result of *how* you produce animal products. There is no good way of doing it at scale. Either you produce intensively, which means massive pollution and terrible welfare; or extensively, which means massive land use and therefore habitat destruction.

Crow friend 🪶

just sayin‘

🌊 Inevitable global coral reef decline under climate change-induced thermal stresses New study identifies a critical threshold: 7.9% annual bleaching triggers major reef degradation. Even best-case climate scenarios show widespread losses by 2100. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

"German far right setting agenda as opponents amplify its ideas, study finds. Normalisation of far-right stances likely to affect success of such parties at ballot boxes across Europe, say researchers" www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

Extraordinary scenes unfolding at the global meeting to put a charge on shipping carbon emissions. "The United States is waging war against multilateralism, UN diplomacy and climate diplomacy, at this meeting now, inside the building and outside the building." 🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

How do humans keep inventing tools and technologies that no single person could create alone? Our new preprint, led by @anilyaman.bsky.social & @ts-brain.bsky.social shows that semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution. 🧠📘 arxiv.org/abs/2510.12837

🔥 The never-ending narrative… This week, I’ve once again heard prominent climate researchers dismiss individual action as either irrelevant or a distraction instigated by the fossil fuel industry. Here’s a 🧵 on why this argument frustrates me to no end and why I think it misses the bigger picture.

UK ministers met fossil fuel lobbyists 500 times in first year of power, analysis shows: Lobbyists attended 48% more meetings than Tories, as Labour accused of giving them ‘backstage pass’ UK politics live – latest updates Government ministers met representatives from the fossil fuel in...

Bevor ich morgen dann wirklich (versprochen!) mehr zu meinem PhD erzähle, möchte ich heute nochmal ein paar statistische Konzepte, die dafür wichtig sind, zusammenfassen: 📈

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increased by a record amount last year, says @wmo-global.bsky.social. The record annual rise comes amid growing signs that forests, peatlands, oceans and other natural "sinks" are failing to absorb as much CO2 as they normally do. wmo.int/publication-...

The ERC workshop on Data Access under the Digital Services Act (DSA) is happening soon! 📅 Date: 22 October 2025 ⏰ Time: 13.30 – 15.30 CEST 💻 Where: buff.ly/KPrkzXA #DSA #DigitalServicesAct #OnlineSafety #Disinformation #ProtectionOfMinors #OpenScience

politicians believe they should act as what Burke called "trustees", while voters tend to believe they should act as "delegates" (Locke). I want to introduce you to this paper by Fox and Shotts that sheds interesting light on this debate: ‘Delegates or Trustees? substack.com/inbox/post/1...

2/ First to speak was @ilonamotto.bsky.social presenting newly published work which shows "evidence supporting a tipping point near 25 % of the total population... Near this critical mass, we observe a high likelihood for a social tipping event, where a large majority quickly adopts new norms."

Which, whose, and how much knowledge do LLMs represent? I'm excited to share our preprint answering these questions: "Epistemic Diversity and Knowledge Collapse in Large Language Models" 📄Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04226 💻Code: github.com/dwright37/ll... 1/10

lol

Excellent advice on paper review: 1. Peer reviewers are volunteers. 2. Map all comments to actions. 3. Address all comments. 4. Focus on improving your paper, instead of arguing. 5. Rarely, and only with strong defense, say no. 6. Don’t take things personally. 7. Avoid recreational revisions.

“We assume that car use is an incompressible liquid that must be routed somewhere. But it’s more more like a gas that fills whatever space it is given.” —Ian Lockwood, Harvard Loeb Fellow, transport planner.

Today is World Homeless Day, and after years reporting on this crisis, I'll just say: homelessness is neither inevitable nor intractable. It's the result of choices—political, economic, moral—that can be unmade. And this: how we treat the unhoused is a bellwether for the violence we will tolerate.

Preliminary results show that the current framework of "AI" makes ppl less likely to help or seek help from other humans, or to seek to soothe conflict, and that people actively prefer that framework to any others, literally serving to make them more dependent on it.

355 MEPs voted today to ban the use of meat denominations like burger & sausage for plant-based products. This is a manufactured issue. Consumers are not confused. If there was ever clearer evidence of political decision-making being heavily influenced by the animal agriculture lobby. This is it.

Until people in the climate movement very publicly stop eating meat and flying, we're not going to seem trustworthy. I will die on this hill.

We finally have a new paper out looking at how summary statistics from the AR6 scenario database are highly dependent on the sampling of the database. High profile statistics are often more representative of the model fingerprint, not the physics. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/

Direct air capture (DAC) continues to be small, slow, and very expensive. Not because it’s an early stage technology, but because it runs into fundamental thermodynamic challenges that money can’t solve. This is exactly why it’s not recommended by Project Drawdown. www.ft.com/content/fa4c...

arXiv alert! 📄🚨 Robustness of small networks arxiv.org/abs/2509.23670 Great to dust off one of my favorite topics and get to collaborate with the legendary @aliceschwarze.bsky.social and Peter Mucha

🚨 Thrilled to release the official repository of the @comunelab.bsky.social! It centralizes access to decade-long research outputs, including 57 data sets and 22 code libraries. A titanic effort: 28,000 lines of code We hope to accelerate #openScience in #ComplexSystems 👉 github.com/CoMuNeLab