John Meluso and Laurent Hébert-Dufresne

PNAS 120 (34) e2303568120

Like chefs at a fast-moving restaurant or engineers in a multidisciplinary project, team members often complete separate, interrelated subsets of larger tasks with limited insight into the work of others. These contexts make it difficult for individuals to assess the value of their own contribution to the collective work. Our work shows that despite this obstacle, individuals can still learn from their neighbors when neighbors’ actions influence collective outcomes. Though the effects are modest, we found that teams with more interactions between members perform better when refining their work while teams with fewer interactions perform better when innovating. We also found that across 34 tasks with diverse qualities, teams that decentralize coordination responsibilities outperform those that do not.

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Subhash Kak 

Theory in Biosciences volume 142, pages 205–210 (2023)

This paper addresses the relationship between information and structure of the genetic code. The code has two puzzling anomalies: First, when viewed as 64 sub-cubes of a 4×4×4 cube, the codons for serine (S) are not contiguous, and there are amino acid codons with zero redundancy, which goes counter to the objective of error correction. To make sense of this, the paper shows that the genetic code must be viewed not only on stereochemical, co-evolution, and error-correction considerations, but also on two additional factors of significance to natural systems, that of an information-theoretic dimensionality of the code data, and the principle of maximum entropy. One implication of non-integer dimensionality associated with data dimensions is self-similarity to different scales, and it is shown that the genetic code does satisfy this property, and it is further shown that the maximum entropy principle operates through the scrambling of the elements in the sense of maximum algorithmic information complexity, generated by an appropriate exponentiation mapping. It is shown that the new considerations and the use of maximum entropy transformation create new constraints that are likely the reasons for the non-uniform codon groups and codons with no redundancy.

Read the full article at: link.springer.com

Why did mammals, grasses and some other groups of organisms explode in diversity only after millions of years? The evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner plumbs the secrets of those “sleeping beauties.”

Read the full article at: www.quantamagazine.org

Jelena Joksimović , Matjaž Perc and Zoran Levnajić

Roy. Soc. Open Science August 2023 Volume 10 Issue 8

Private businesses are often entrusted with public contracts, wherein public money is allocated to a private company. This process raises concerns about transparency, even in the most developed democracies. But are there any regularities guiding this process? Do all private companies benefit equally from the state budgets? Here, we tackle these questions focusing on the case of Slovenia, which keeps excellent records of this kind of public spending. We examine a dataset detailing every transfer of public money to the private sector from January 2003 to May 2020. During this time, Slovenia has conducted business with no less than 248 989 private companies. We find that the cumulative distribution of money received per company can be reasonably well explained by a power-law or lognormal fit. We also show evidence for the first-mover advantage, and determine that companies receive new funding in a way that is roughly linear over time. These results indicate that, despite all human factors involved, Slovenian public spending is at least to some extent regulated by emergent self-organizing principles.

Read the full article at: royalsocietypublishing.org