JOSEPH L.-H. TSUI, et al.

SCIENCE 20 Jul 2023 Vol 381, Issue 6655 pp. 336-343

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants of concern (VOCs) now arise in the context of heterogeneous human connectivity and population immunity. Through a large-scale phylodynamic analysis of 115,622 Omicron BA.1 genomes, we identified >6,000 introductions of the antigenically distinct VOC into England and analyzed their local transmission and dispersal history. We find that six of the eight largest English Omicron lineages were already transmitting when Omicron was first reported in southern Africa (22 November 2021). Multiple datasets show that importation of Omicron continued despite subsequent restrictions on travel from southern Africa as a result of export from well-connected secondary locations. Initiation and dispersal of Omicron transmission lineages in England was a two-stage process that can be explained by models of the country’s human geography and hierarchical travel network. Our results enable a comparison of the processes that drive the invasion of Omicron and other VOCs across multiple spatial scales.

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For over a century, biologists have had to contend with a complicated picture of genetics, which they’ve only recently begun to understand.

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The proof establishes new conditions that cause connected oscillators to sway in sync.

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A. Reina, T. Bose, V. Srivastava, J.A.R. Marshall

Royal Society Open Science 10: 230175, 2023.

It is usually assumed that information cascades are most likely to occur when an early but incorrect opinion spreads through the group. Here, we analyse models of confidence-sharing in groups and reveal the opposite result: simple but plausible models of naive-Bayesian decision-making exhibit information cascades when group decisions are synchronous; however, when group decisions are asynchronous, the early decisions reached by Bayesian decision-makers tend to be correct and dominate the group consensus dynamics. Thus early decisions actually rescue the group from making errors, rather than contribute to it. We explore the likely realism of our assumed decision-making rule with reference to the evolution of mechanisms for aggregating social information, and known psychological and neuroscientific mechanisms.

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Cristobal Pais, Jose Ramon Gonzalez-Olabarria, Pelagie Elimbi Moudio, Jordi Garcia-Gonzalo, Marta C. González & Zuo-Jun Max Shen
Communications Earth & Environment volume 4, Article number: 267 (2023)

Different interpretations of the fire regime concept have limited the capacity to allocate specific fire regimes worldwide. To solve this limitation, in this study, we present a framework to frame contemporary fire regimes spatially on a global scale. We process historical wildfire records between 2000 and 2018 across the six continents. We uncover 15 global pyromes with clear differences in fire-related metrics, such as frequency and size. The pyromes were further divided into 62 regimes based on spatial aggregation patterns. This spatial framing of contemporary fire regimes allows for an interpretation of how a combination of driving factors such as vegetation, climate, and demographic features can result in a specific fire regime. To the best of our knowledge, this open source platform at unprecedented scale expands on existing classification efforts and bridges the gaps between global and regional fire studies. A framework to classify fire regimes spatially on a global scale based on historical records between 2000 and 2018 reveals 15 global pyromes with differences in fire-related metrics and indicates how factors such as vegetation, climate, and demographic features can result in a specific fire regime.

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