Lovely article in Quanta Magazine about our recent neutral hypothesis explaining why prokaryotes have never evolved complex multicellularity.

This isn't the simplest story to explain, and Veronique Greenwood did a great job making it widely accessible.

quantamagazine.org/the-mystery-of…

How can we model the emergent complexity of microbial ecosystems? How to do the maths & predict their dynamics, from the gut & the soil to the biosphere? Here's a great NatureEcoEvo review Víctor de Lorenzo Barcelona Collaboratorium Fernando T. Maestre victor Sara Mitri nature.com/articles/s4155…

Is there an arrow of time in the brain? Can Boltzmann and Shannon's ideas be used to understand it? Check this paper by ICREA Community Gustavo Deco, Yonatan Sanz Perl Morten Kringelbach on how physics and information theory reveal how hierarchical cognition works cell.com/trends/cogniti…

NOAA has confirmed a global coral bleaching event is occurring, the fourth such event in history.

sciencenews.org/article/ocean-…

After five months of glitching, the venerable space probe contacted Earth and is continuing its interstellar mission billions of kilometers away.

sciencenews.org/article/nasa-v…

Poincaré left a trail of breadcrumbs in nonlinear dynamics: Why are homoclinic orbits so essential for chaos? I want to come at this from an angle you don't usually see -- one which shows just how universal homoclinic chaos really is, in the simplest possible way.

'In Memoriam: Dan Dennett on Mortality, Life, and Existence': a beautiful eulogy from his friend Richard Dawkins with a great interview, where Dennett reflects on so many issues and the joy and privilege of living in this 'stupendous planet' Santa Fe Institute youtube.com/watch?v=wFQ4v9…

How can we model the collective behavior of complex systems with many dimensions? Is it possible 2 find a model reduction that captures the key components? Check this great paper in Physical Review Letters & how to use it in many different contexts (networks+Ising) physics.byu.edu/faculty/transt…

This is my last tweet. The more I learn about Musk’s projects the less I want to associate with any of them.
DCD

This one was more complicated than I'd imagined, and there's a lot that's condensed in this short piece. All the same, it's yet more reason to suspect criticality is an adaptively useful state to be in.

Is biology predictable? This is a hard problem, relevant across scales, from conservation to the human microbiome. Check this Nature Reviews Microbiology paper by Allison Lopatkin, PhD & James Collins. Barcelona Collaboratorium Víctor de Lorenzo Manlio De Domenico Daniel R. Amor static1.squarespace.com/static/5c26495…

My grandfather built motors that powered big machines. In a lab not so different from his workshop, my colleagues and I uncovered the assembly of the bacterial motor. Today, this discovery has been published in Nature Microbiology #MolecularNodes #Discovery nature.com/articles/s4156…

✅ One step closer to Titan! NASA confirmed the #DragonflyMission to Saturn's organic-rich moon. This allows the mission to progress to completion of final design, followed by the construction and testing of the entire spacecraft and science instruments. go.nasa.gov/4cXAQf8

Can Turing patterns be engineered in synthetic biological populations? Yes: A recent paper by Imperial College London Mark Isalan shows how to obtain regular and tunable Turing structures in growing colonies using Synbio: biorxiv.org/content/biorxi… Víctor de Lorenzo