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It is a common belief that power-law distributed avalanches are inherently unpredictable. This idea affects phenomena as diverse as evolution, earthquakes, superconducting vortices, stock markets, etc; from atomic to social scales. It…

Human settlements on Earth are scattered in a multitude of shapes, sizes and spatial arrangements. These patterns are often not random but a result of complex geographical, cultural, economic and historical processes that have profound…

The migration of cells is relevant for processes such as morphogenesis, wound healing, and invasion of cancer cells. In order to move, single cells deform cyclically. However, it is not understood how these shape oscillations influence…

Aggregation of ice crystals is a key process governing precipitation. Individual ice crystals exhibit considerable diversity of shape, and a wide range of physical processes could influence their aggregation; despite this we show that a…

Natural ecosystems are characterized by striking diversity of form and functions and yet exhibit deep symmetries emerging across scales of space, time and organizational complexity. Species-area relationships and species-abundance…

Hierarchy is one of the most conspicuous features of numerous natural, technological and social systems. The underlying structures are typically complex and their most relevant organizational principle is the ordering of the ties among the…

Fish, birds, insects and robots frequently swim or fly in groups. During their 3 dimensional collective motion, these agents do not stop, they avoid collisions by strong short-range repulsion, and achieve group cohesion by weak long-range…

In many dryland environments, vegetation self-organizes into bands that can be clearly identified in remotely-sensed imagery. The status of individual bands can be tracked over time, allowing for a detailed remote analysis of how human…

We present a new framework for analyzing the evolution of information in geophysical systems. Understanding how information, and its counterpart, uncertainty, propagates is central to predictability studies and has significant implications…

Spontaneous emergence of organized states in materials driven by non-equilibrium conditions is of significant fundamental and technological interest. In many cases, the organized states are complex, hence, with some well-studied exceptions,…

Erosion shapes our landscape and occurs when a sufficient shear stress is exerted by a fluid on a sedimented layer. What controls erosion at a microscopic level remains debated, especially near the threshold forcing where it stops. Here we…

Quasi-periodic structures of quasicrystals yield novel effects in diverse systems. However, there is little investigation on employing quasi-periodic structures in the morphology control. Here, we show the use of quasi-periodic surface…

Condensed water on vertical surfaces ultimately leaves the substrate at the lower edge, where accumulated liquid detaches as drops. While droplet growth and surface transport have been extensively studied, this final release step remains…

The self-similarity of complex systems has been studied intensely across different domains due to its potential applications in system modeling, complexity analysis, etc., as well as for deep theoretical interest. Existing studies rely on…

In the context of global climate change, geological materials are increasingly destabilized by water flow and infiltration. We study the creeping dynamics of a densely monitored landslide in Western Norway to decipher the role of fluid flow…

Uncovering the mechanism leading to the scaling law in human trajectories is of fundamental importance in understanding many spatiotemporal phenomena. We propose a hierarchical geographical model to mimic the real traffic system, upon which…

With the deterioration of climate, the phenomenon of rain-induced flooding has become frequent. To mitigate its impact, recent works adopt convolutional neural network or its variants to predict the floods. However, these methods directly…

By generalizing a class of models recently introduced to account for protracted transients in biological systems, we identify a novel mechanism for hyperuniformity. In this model, competition of particles over a shared resource guides the…

Emergence of regular spatial patterns is a hallmark in living matter ranging from subcellular organelles to developing embryos and to ecosystems. Mechanisms for the formation of ordered spatial patterns in biology often require chemical…

It is well known that jammed soft materials will flow if sheared above their yield stress - think mayonnaise spread on bread - but a complete microscopic description of this seemingly sim- ple process has yet to emerge. What remains elusive…