Francesca Bertacchini, Carmelo Scuro, Pietro Pantano & Eleonora Bilotta 
Scientific Reports volume 12, Article number: 16543 (2022)

Understanding the relationship between brain architecture and brain function is a central issue in neuroscience. We modeled realistic spatio-temporal patterns of brain activity on a human connectome with a Boolean networks model with the aim of computationally replicating certain cognitive functions as they emerge from the standardization of many fMRI studies, identified as patterns of human brain activity. Results from the analysis of simulation data, carried out for different parameters and initial conditions identified many possible paths in the space of parameters of these network models, with normal (ordered asymptotically constant patterns), chaotic (oscillating or disordered) but also highly organized configurations, with countless spatial–temporal patterns. We interpreted these results as routes to chaos, permanence of the systems in regimes of complexity, and ordered stationary behavior, associating these dynamics to cognitive processes. The most important result of this work is the study of emergent neural circuits, i.e., configurations of areas that synchronize over time, both locally and globally, determining the emergence of computational analogues of cognitive processes, which may or may not be similar to the functioning of biological brain. Furthermore, results put in evidence the creation of how the brain creates structures of remote communication. These structures have hierarchical organization, where each level allows for the emergence of brain organizations which behave at the next superior level. Taken together these results allow the interplay of dynamical and topological roots of the multifaceted brain dynamics to be understood.

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Alberto Bracci, Jörn Boehnke, Abeer ElBahrawy, Nicola Perra, Alexander Teytelboym, Andrea Baronchelli

PNAS Nexus, pgac201

Online marketplaces are the main engines of legal and illegal e-commerce, yet their empirical properties are poorly understood due to the absence of large-scale data. We analyze two comprehensive datasets containing 245M transactions (16B USD) that took place on online marketplaces between 2010 and 2021, covering 28 dark web marketplaces, i.e., unregulated markets whose main currency is Bitcoin, and 144 product markets of one popular regulated e-commerce platform. We show that transactions in online marketplaces exhibit strikingly similar patterns despite significant differences in language, lifetimes, products, regulation, and technology. Specifically, we find remarkable regularities in the distributions of transaction amounts, number of transactions, inter-event times and time between first and last transactions. We show that buyer behavior is affected by the memory of past interactions and use this insight to propose a model of network formation reproducing our main empirical observations. Our findings have implications for understanding market power on online marketplaces as well as inter-marketplace competition , and provide empirical foundation for theoretical economic models of online marketplaces.

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Erin G. Teich, Jason Z. Kim, Christopher W. Lynn, Samantha C. Simon, Andrei A. Klishin, Karol P. Szymula, Pragya Srivastava, Lee C. Bassett, Perry Zurn, Jordan D. Dworkin & Dani S. Bassett 
Nature Physics volume 18, pages1161–1170 (2022)

The under-attribution of women’s contributions to scientific scholarship is well known and well studied. One measure of this under-attribution is the citation gap between men and women: the under-citation of papers authored by women relative to expected rates coupled with an over-citation of papers authored by men relative to expected rates. Here we explore this citation gap in contemporary physics. We find a global bias wherein papers authored by women are significantly under-cited, and papers authored by men are significantly over-cited. Moreover, we find that citation behaviour varies along several dimensions, such that imbalances differ according to who is citing, where they are citing and what they are citing. Specifically, citation imbalance in favour of man-authored papers is highest for papers authored by men, papers published in general physics journals and papers for which citing authors probably have less domain or author familiarity. Our results suggest that although deciding which papers to cite is an individual choice, the cumulative effects of these choices needlessly harm a subset of scholars. We discuss several strategies for the mitigation of these effects, including conscious behavioural changes at the individual, journal and community levels.

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