Brennan Klein, Harrison Hartle, Munik Shrestha, Ana Cecilia Zenteno, David Barros Sierra Cordera, José R Nicolás-Carlock, Ana I Bento, Benjamin M Althouse, Bernardo Gutierrez, Marina Escalera-Zamudio, Arturo Reyes-Sandoval, Oliver G Pybus, Alessandro Vespignani, José Alberto Díaz Quiñonez, Samuel V Scarpino, Moritz U G Kraemer
PNAS Nexus, pgae306

During outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases, internationally connected cities often experience large and early outbreaks, while rural regions follow after some delay. This hierarchical structure of disease spread is influenced primarily by the multiscale structure of human mobility. However, during the COVID-19 epidemic, public health responses typically did not take into consideration the explicit spatial structure of human mobility when designing non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). NPIs were applied primarily at national or regional scales. Here we use weekly anonymized and aggregated human mobility data and spatially highly resolved data on COVID-19 cases at the municipality level in Mexico to investigate how behavioural changes in response to the pandemic have altered the spatial scales of transmission and interventions during its first wave (March – June 2020). We find that the epidemic dynamics in Mexico were initially driven by SARS-CoV-2 exports from Mexico State and Mexico City, where early outbreaks occurred. The mobility network shifted after the implementation of interventions in late March 2020, and the mobility network communities became more disjointed while epidemics in these communities became increasingly synchronised. Our results provide dynamic insights into how to use network science and epidemiological modelling to inform the spatial scale at which interventions are most impactful in mitigating the spread of COVID-19 and infectious diseases in general.

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Bao Tran Truong, Xiaodan Lou, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer

PNAS Nexus, Volume 3, Issue 7, July 2024, pgae258,

Social media, seen by some as the modern public square, is vulnerable to manipulation. By controlling inauthentic accounts impersonating humans, malicious actors can amplify disinformation within target communities. The consequences of such operations are difficult to evaluate due to the challenges posed by collecting data and carrying out ethical experiments that would influence online communities. Here we use a social media model that simulates information diffusion in an empirical network to quantify the impacts of adversarial manipulation tactics on the quality of content. We find that the presence of hub accounts, a hallmark of social media, exacerbates the vulnerabilities of online communities to manipulation. Among the explored tactics that bad actors can employ, infiltrating a community is the most likely to make low-quality content go viral. Such harm can be further compounded by inauthentic agents flooding the network with low-quality, yet appealing content, but is mitigated when bad actors focus on specific targets, such as influential or vulnerable individuals. These insights suggest countermeasures that platforms could employ to increase the resilience of social media users to manipulation.

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Marten Scheffer, W. Neil Adger, Stephen R. Carpenter, Carl Folke, Tim Lenton, Gaia Vince, Frances Westley, Chi Xu

One Earth VOLUME 7, ISSUE 7, P1151-1154, JULY 19, 2024

Climate change will worsen conditions for people in the Global South, while conditions in large parts of the North will improve. Migration seems an effective adaptation strategy. However, making that a win-win for migrants and receiving communities requires revision of the food system, rules for mobility, and strategies for social integration.

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Cristian Axenie, Oliver López-Corona, Michail A. Makridis, Meisam Akbarzadeh, Matteo Saveriano, Alexandru Stancu & Jeffrey West
npj Complexity volume 1, Article number: 12 (2024)

Antifragility characterizes the benefit of a dynamical system derived from the variability in environmental perturbations. Antifragility carries a precise definition that quantifies a system’s output response to input variability. Systems may respond poorly to perturbations (fragile) or benefit from perturbations (antifragile). In this manuscript, we review a range of applications of antifragility theory in technical systems (e.g., traffic control, robotics) and natural systems (e.g., cancer therapy, antibiotics). While there is a broad overlap in methods used to quantify and apply antifragility across disciplines, there is a need for precisely defining the scales at which antifragility operates. Thus, we provide a brief general introduction to the properties of antifragility in applied systems and review relevant literature for both natural and technical systems’ antifragility. We frame this review within three scales common to technical systems: intrinsic (input–output nonlinearity), inherited (extrinsic environmental signals), and induced (feedback control), with associated counterparts in biological systems: ecological (homogeneous systems), evolutionary (heterogeneous systems), and interventional (control). We use the common noun in designing systems that exhibit antifragile behavior across scales and guide the reader along the spectrum of fragility–adaptiveness–resilience–robustness–antifragility, the principles behind it, and its practical implications.

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