In our latest paper in PNAS, we ask: How can scientific progress be accelerated to meet the urgent challenges of the Anthropocene? We point to significant barriers in forecasting & prediction efforts for the biosphere 🧵👇 🧪🌎🦋 1/n www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #ScienceTwitter #Ecology #Anthropocene

When change moves faster than systems can adapt, they tip Our culture of “now-ism” risks pushing climate, economies and societies past their limits The latest #ComplexityThoughts: 👉 manlius.substack.com/p/how-modern... 🎧 on Spotify and Apple #ComplexSystems #Resilience @ricardsole.bsky.social

EXCLUSIVE: Thousands of leaked messages show leaders of Young Republican groups joking about gas chambers, slavery and rape in a private Telegram chat. Inside rising GOP leaders’ racist chats — obtained by POLITICO and spanning more than 7 months👇

Excited to be speaking at the @sfiscience.bsky.social forum on Nascent Research Ideas this Wednesday to report on my Complexity Global School group's co-creative art project: "Growing a Sympoietic Art Organism". Join on October 15th from 2:00 to 3:00 PM GMT+1. Zoom: us02web.zoom.us/j/8780969926...

Can general artificial intelligence emerge by not following the evolution of complex brains? In this 2022 paper with @brigan.bsky.social we argued that embodiment, mind reading (mirror systems), mental time traveling... are necessary conditions www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24... @anilseth.bsky.social

Can consciousness arise purely from computation, or does it require the biological mechanisms that allow computing? The tension between computational roles and biological realizers may hold the key. Check this paper by @neddo.bsky.social @mkhochb.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

It is often argued that the origin of life must be related to "phase transitions" This concept is often misused, or even abused. In a new paper with @ricardsole.bsky.social we discuss which types of transitions might be involved and some relevant models. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

New preprint out! I did a literature review to check whether the use of distinct types of spatial networks in ecology has led to research silos or, instead, generated bridges among theoretical frameworks due to their methodological similarities. Find out here 👉 ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Very proud of this paper in BioScience : « Too cute to be wild: what teddy bears reveal about our disconnection from nature » 🧸 are more than toys, they shape among our first emotional connections to nature. But their design may also distort how we see wildlife ! 👉 doi.org/10.1093/bios... 🧪🦤

Im of course 100% on board with this argument but who’s gonna tell the authors about Amartya Sen, Mahbub Al Haq, 30 years of calculating HDI, and the human development approach more broadly. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Human ignitions and lightning strikes both influence global fire regimes. Here the authors disaggregate the two effects and show that anthropogenic influences have lengthened fire seasons globally, regardless of other factors 🧪🔥 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Depolarization is not "a scalable solution for reducing societal-level conflict.... achieving lasting depolarization will likely require....moving beyond individual-level treatments to address the elite behaviors and structural incentives that fuel partisan conflict" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

@gstonge.bsky.social Hi Guillaume! I'm Phileas. I recently emailed you to express interest in working with you as a graduate student at the Network Science Institute. Would you be willing to chat with me in the coming weeks?

video www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyU5...

It took 8 months to write up this short piece "Updating the Complex Systems Keyword Diagram Using Collective Feedback and Latest Literature Data" arxiv.org/abs/2509.11997

Interesting research out of Spain onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

I have to keep this deliberately vague, but this is a total disaster for academic research. And imposing it so suddenly is just cruel. I’ve got friends scrambling to get back to the US before midnight tonight. Do you know how hard that is to do on 36 hours of notice?

2022. they don’t miss theonion.com/left-wing-gr...

Dans le cadre d’une étude qu’il conduit sur les attaques aux libertés académiques, Pierre-Nicolas Baudot a dénombré plus de 70 livres consacrés à la "menace wokiste", publiés entre 2020 et 2023. "Si tous ne se vendent pas très bien, ils disposent d’une couverture médiatique très importante."

Quelqu’un de tout à fait sérieux m’a ri au nez et répondu “n’exagérons rien” il y a quelques mois quand j’ai dit que c’était sur que ça arriverait bientôt.

Wrote about the week. How the shooter's ID didn't appear to matter to ppl. How the discourse takes place in very same spaces that incubate/perpetuate hate & violence. How shooters now know that their acts will be flattened, analyzed, argued over & amplified. How all of this feels so dark & poisonous

A dream of the fields study

Can selfish agents create intelligent group behaviour without planning or cooperation? Yes, if they adapt who they interact with. This simple rule leads to neural-network-like learning and global efficiency. Read the paper: watermark02.silverchair.com/artl_a_00029...

In 1988 Umberto Eco wrote Foucault's Pendulum. The plot is: a bunch of guys working at a self-publisher house, for fun, take their huge crackpot and crank slush pile and jam it all together using a simple markov chain program written in BASIC. They create a Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory.

I wrote an op-ed on the world-class STEM research ecosystem in the United States, and how this ecosystem is now under attack on multiple fronts by the current administration: newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-an-awar...

Il devient difficile de trouver le salut au milieu des nazis ⤵️

🎉 After 8 amazing years, Hoaxy is retiring! Its legacy lives on in OSoMeNet—our new, unified tool for social media research. Thank you for supporting Hoaxy! 🙌 osome.iu.edu/tools/osomen...

New review in PRX Life, where we propose a tangibility scale for the physics of social interactions, and highlight a few tangible examples - from dead fish “swimming” to efficient schooling, warm penguin huddles, and dry ant rafts. Written with the brilliant Chantal Nguyen 🐟🐧🐜 tinyurl.com/naet5tdh

Zoe Drayson says “yes”: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... I say “no”: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... And Danielle Williams says “it depends on what you mean”: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Read all about it!

Information, complexity, evolution and computation are connected in profound ways. How? Algorithmic information theory is one fundamental piece of the puzzle. Here's one of the classic papers, by the great Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov complexityexplorer.s3.amazonaws.com/Epistemologi...

Does a ChatGPT query really use ten times more energy than a Google search? Does training any AI model emit as much CO2 as 5 cars? and can AI help us reduce global GHG emissions by 10%? 🤔 We tracked down the origins of these numbers 🕵‍♀️ and wrote a paper about it! arxiv.org/abs/2506.15572

Je découvre qu'il y a une multitude de travaux sur la question : journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1... Un bon objectif pour la SFSIC 2027!

How media competition fuels the spread of misinformation | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Story: theconversation.com/private-brow...

"we can safely assess that there were no lasagne encoded in the Big Bang" royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

"We urge delegates to the third United Nations Ocean Conference to recognize that these critical risks require responses that move beyond symbolic commitments" As the UN Ocean Conference #UNOC3 begins, Gattuso et al argue that US federal science cuts pose a profound global challenge rdcu.be/ep896 🌊

Last time Trump called for remigration (a form of ethnic cleansing), national media outlets absolutely failed to cover it. They NEED to do a better job explaining it this time. www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump...

Grasslands tend to be limited by both nutrient and water availability. Here, standardized field experiments show that the effects of nutrient addition on grassland biomass may cancel out the negative impact of drought, but the outcome depends on aridity www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1. A large and growing literature on "generative agent-based modeling" aims to study social science questions by using LLMs to simulate the behavior of people in naturalistic situations. I think it's a lost cause, for the same reason I was sent to the principal's office in third grade.

Consistent with cultural evolution models by Joe Henrich, and later work by @adampowell.bsky.social , @maximederex.bsky.social , Nicole Creanza and others on partial connectivity driving cumulative culture. E.g. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

From humans to swarm intelligence, what is the impact of uninformed individuals on collective decisions? Check this comment in @science.org by @kenjennings.bsky.social and @carlbergstrom.com on @icouzin.bsky.social et al's paper cdanfort.w3.uvm.edu/csc-reading-...

A comprehensive illustrated protocol for clearing, mounting, and imaging leaf venation networks 🌾🧪 bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

PNAS Nexus: Coexistence of balance and hierarchies: An ego perspective to explain empirical networks http://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf130

"Witnessing large-scale systems slowly unravel in real time can be profoundly surreal and frightening. The hypernormalization framework offers a way to understand what we’re feeling and why."

Totally missed this last year's paper: A great introduction to continuous-time modelling (deterministic & stochastic)!

one of the strangest phenomenons in political commentary over the last decade is people treating trump purely as an epiphenomenon of liberal discourse norms they don't like foreignpolicy.com/2025/05/09/p...

Germany says far-right ideology behind record 40% rise in politically motivated crimes

Amazingly, reaction times using screens while driving are worse than being drunk or high—no wonder 90 percent of drivers hate using touchscreens in cars. Finally the auto industry is coming to its senses. Real buttons are sooooooo back baby!

Les écolos veulent-ils interdire le comté, sixième fromage préféré des Français ? C’est ce qu’a essayé de faire croire la droitosphère, avec l’étonnant soutien du préfet du Jura. Retour sur une désinformation qui en dit long sur le "backlash" écologique du moment.