Benedict Cumberbatch recites Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s “On this land there are reasons to live” poem at Together for Palestine. #GazaGenocide #GazaHolocaust

Can a Netflix series teach us something important not about the ancient past, but about how we create and evaluate knowledge today? Göbekli Tepe, underground cities, ancient deluges and Bayes theorem. An unusual #ComplexityThoughts essay this week. Curious? 👉 open.substack.com/pub/manlius/...

Can science ever escape its demons? Enjoying these three brilliant books by historian of science Jimena Canales. They remind us that science isn’t a straight line. History, time, imagination, they're all up for grabs. @gemmadlc.bsky.social @jordipinero.bsky.social @seanmcarroll.bsky.social

Will humans and AI coevolve in the future? As interdependencies grow, the two could come to function not merely as interacting agents, but as an integrated evolutionary individual. Check this paper in @pnas.org by @mkhochb.bsky.social & P Rainey @sfiscience.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

BREAKING NEWS: NASA has found a potential sign of past life on Mars. www.nasa.gov/news-release...

Can a single cell learn? Even without a brain, some microbes show simple forms of cognition. Can this basal cognition be engineered? Check our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social on the minimal synthetic circuits & their cognitive limits. @drmichaellevin.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thank you so much @ricardsole.bsky.social I’ll always treasure those first steps with you! Chaos control remains my goal!!

Delighted that my friend @lmprida.bsky.social, a great scientist, has been named director of the new Cajal Neuroscience Center at @csic.es. Thirty years ago, as a graduate student in my Lab she published her first paper on chaos control in neural networks. I can't be more proud and happy.

How safe is your mind in a world flooded with junk information? Yuval Noah Harari warns that unlike past media, AI-driven networks never rest, blurring the boundaries between us and digital reality. He calls to preserve your autonomy as AI becomes more unpredictable  www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1Ov...

How did differentiation evolve to allow for complex multicellular systems? In this @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social‬ paper, Boolean networks are used to answer long-standing questions in the evolution of cell type diversity. @wcratcliff.bsky.social d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/115269531/j....

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...

Have I told you today that I love Jupiter? (Image from the incredible JunoCam) 🧪

Can cellular life be created in the lab? We are not yet there, but clearly getting closer! Check this paper where a new scenario for protocell replication is presented by Job Boekhoven and co-workers @manlius.bsky.social www.cell.com/chem/pdf/S24...

Can a virus help uncover Turing patterns in nature? In this @commsbio.nature.com paper, researchers show how the tulip breaking virus triggers the expression of a pigment that can display a broad range of (observable) stripe patterns @philipcball.bsky.social biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Why is universality such a central concept in complex systems? How does it connect Turing Machines and Spin Systems? In this new paper, Tomáš Gonda and @gemmadlc.bsky.social present an accessible account on how to identify and compare different universalities arxiv.org/pdf/2406.16607

Did you know that chemosensitive motile E. coli can efficiently explore nontrivial mazes in times much shorter than a no-memory (Markovian) walk would predict, and can collectively escape from a fractal topology? Now you do. Amazing! #ComplexSystems 🦠🧪🌐💡 journals.aps.org/prx/abstract...

Platforms, financial interests, human behavior at individual and collective levels, interconnectedness: the perfect mix of ingredients for a complex system that requires systemic solutions well beyond linear thinking. New piece out in #ComplexityThoughts: manlius.substack.com/p/competing-...

What kinds of life are possible? How can we know about that regarding life origins? Here's our new paper to appear in @royalsocietypublishing.org with C Kempes & S Stepney. Check our space of the possible for replicators. @sfiscience.bsky.social @manlius.bsky.social www.preprints.org/manuscript/2...

My latest @newscientist.com cartoon

What is emergence? This is one of the most central ingredients of complexity, and a challenging one to formalize. Here's a paper by @seanmcarroll.bsky.social & Achyth Parola that attempts to classify different forms of emergence. @manlius.bsky.social @sfiscience.bsky.social arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15468

If a foreign adversary snuck into our Federal budget and cut science research and education the way we’re cutting it ourselves — strategically undermining America’s long-term health, wealth, and security — we would likely consider it an act of war.

Meet Syn57, a living cell that only needs 57 codons, not the standard 64. Here's my story on how synthetic biology is tackling the mystery of our bloated genetic code. Gift link: nyti.ms/3Hf4f9v

14 years after Alan Turing's death, an unpublished manuscript emerged where he suggested the idea of a "disordered" computer that anticipated the rise of connectionism cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Alan...

Do ant colonies work like liquid brains? Check this great paper in @pnas.org led by @ceabcsic.bsky.social Pol Fernandez and F.Bartumeus that shows how to explain collective foraging by modelling ants as neural agents @jordipinero.bsky.social @frazambelli.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

What does physics bring to neuroscience? As discussed by @wbialek.bsky.social, the 2024 Physics #NobelPrize was awarded to John Hopfield & Geoffrey Hinton for the discovery of new classes of emergent phenomena where collective dynamics give rise to neural information processing. @brigan.bsky.social

How can scientists compete with pseudoscience in algorithmic ecosystems? This comes after several discussions with colleagues and friends, such as @ricardsole.bsky.social I have just dropped this post on Linkedin (see the attached image, in case): www.linkedin.com/feed/update/... Ideas? Answers?

Just 30 years ago, we didn’t know of a single planet beyond our Solar System. Now we’ve found thousands, and we know that almost every star has worlds of its own. The next great leap is proving that some of them harbour life. I wish Carl Sagan were here to see this cosmic golden age.

How to deal with the multiscale nature of evolution, which displays different time scales of change? We need to replace classic genotype spaces with multiscapes. Here's a great paper by my friend Susanna Manrubia and coworkers @mncn-csic.bsky.social rsob.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royo... …

How do combinatorial evolution processes lead to singularities? Check our paper with @svalver.bsky.social & Dani Amor on a general formulation of combinatorial growth and its relevance for understanding innovations in evolution and technology journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... @leecronin.bsky.social

How predictable are complex systems? What is the time horizon for predictions? This is a central issue within CCSS and nonlinear science. A new paper in @pnas.org shows how a data-driven approach can provide answers. See a comment by @manlius.bsky.social here: manlius.substack.com/p/complexity...

I think the honest answer (but a sceptical one) to this question is: probably not (we can't know right now). But I can answer two other questions. (1) Is Avi Loeb's late alien work serious and honest? NO. (2) Is this damaging science when Loeb uses his authority as a Harvard academic? YES.

I don't agree with everything in this article, but I do agree with this: "The act of writing the thing is the same thing as the thinking of it. If you can’t write it, you haven’t actually thought it." And AI allows us to 'not' think. engelsbergideas.com/essays/a-war... #academicsky #ai #teaching

How do fleeting experiences become lasting memories? Initially, your hippocampus and cortex work together, but over time, the cortex assumes control. Check this excellent @cshlpress.bsky.social paper on Memory Consolidation cshperspectives.cshlp.org/content/7/8/...

Are there universal principles for the structural limits of living organisms? How can physics provide a theory? Check this @pnas.org paper that derives Kleiber’s law from 1st principles, capturing geometric differences and predicting life forms between plants & animals. www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

To me, part of this is that these “billionaire geniuses” are so bought in to the myth of their own brilliance that their ego can’t acknowledge how they just happened to be standing next to a money making machine at the right moment in history, and that their contributions rest on the work of others.

What is complexity? Complex Systems made of many interacting units display "emergence", i.e. global properties that cannot be reduced to the properties of the units. A new idea? WM Wheeler was one of the advocates of emergence, back in 1927 @sfiscience.bsky.social books.google.es/books/about/...

What drives the self-organization of life? By linking three major ecological theories, we show that ecosystems maximize power at intermediate efficiency close to bifurcation points. Energy flux meets life's organizing principles. @sfiscience.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

To identify fundamental neuroscientific principles that generalize across species, systems and circuits, neuroscientists must embrace an evolutionary perspective, argue Karl Farrow and @katjareinhard.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

How does collective complexity in an organism emerge from individual cells? How does cognition arise in brains, tissues or ant colonies? How does the self persist despite constant regeneration? Check this discussion between @davideagleman.bsky.social & Mike Levin www.youtube.com/watch?v=-isM...

What can be predicted when dealing with the real world? What are the limits of prediction? Watch this fantastic talk by @evamirandag.bsky.social on the nature of undecidability. With Turing, fluid turbulence, computation, chaos theory and ... rubber ducks www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsJ8...

The newly discovered microbe provisionally known as Sukunaarchaeum isn’t a virus. But like viruses, it seemingly has one purpose: to make more of itself. scim.ag/4e6y0W2

How do we know that a physical system is "computing"? What do we mean by that? This is an important question within complex systems science, and here's a great research @royalsocietypublishing.org paper that explores the problem royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

How does the brain allow mental time travel? How is the past used to predict the future? This is one of the most fascinating problems in neuroscience and the evolution of minds (and is nowhere in AI systems). Check this excellent review @manlius.bsky.social thedanplan.com/blog/wp-cont...

How did human language emerge? A key step was combining sounds into words, shifting from analog to digital to overcome error thresholds. Fascinating paper with deep ties to Shannon’s coding theory. @sfiscience.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10....

Steven Rose was a neuroscientist and critic of genetic determinist views of human behaviour; he was also a founder member of the now defunct British Society for Social Responsbility in Science (which perhaps needs to be resurrected…) www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Is there an ecology of genomes? Can we see ecological communities of genetic elements behaving like species in a rainforest? In this @plosone.org paper, the authors show how genetic elements (like transposons) occupy chromosomes as species fill space in in the wild journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

How do ant colonies perform computations? What kind of dynamical state allows them to do it? It has already been 30 years since my colleague, Octavio Miramontes, and I suggested that they, as liquid neural networks, might exploit critical states. Check: hal.elte.hu/~vicsek/down...

Can we build a science for chess? That has been an old dream shared by great scholars, including Turing, Shannon and Ulam. In this paper, Marc Barthelemy shows how to define a measure of network Fragility that allows detecting tipping points in the game www.researchgate.net/profile/Marc...

The climate science predictions from 30 years ago are becoming a reality, and we are running out of time. While we should be investing in this, a handful of billionaire bullies are pushing us in the opposite direction. We need to stop them, starting from challenging the disinformation they create.