物理与社会

Rankings shape the visibility and success of cultural products, yet their temporal dynamics remain underexplored when comparing distinct ranked objects within the same domain. Here, we use nearly seven decades of Billboard Hot 100 songs and…

Can a population of people not individually inclined to harm others nonetheless produce harmful collective outcomes, purely because of the institutional structure they inhabit? Social scientists have long argued yes, but existing accounts…

The Mahabharata and Ramayana constitute the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. Traditionally they are viewed quite differently, with the former being seen as more historical and the latter more poetic. We perform network analysis on…

Network immunization is a powerful tool for controlling contagion processes ranging from infectious diseases to misinformation diffusion. While prior works have focused on pairwise or static networks, immunization dynamics in temporal…

Pedestrian traffic is commonly characterized using local density, yet the interactions experienced by individuals depend on the relative positions and perceptual relevance of surrounding pedestrians. This raises the question of whether…

The Widom line, initially identified as a crossover line between liquid-like and gas-like behavior in water and supercritical fluids, separates these two types of behavior. Here, we show that an analogous line arises in spin models on…

We extend the persistent homology formalism done in references~\cite{paper1,paper2} to the Han Dynasty ($206~\mathrm{BCE}$--$220~\mathrm{CE}$), testing whether the collapse threshold $\Hstar = 0.5241$ and the three-network decomposition…

Mobility systems of people and goods are inherently multi-scale, spanning levels of organization from individual cities to regions and nations. Understanding whether mobility networks exhibit similar patterns across these scales is…

The naming choices of powerful rulers encode millennia of cultural, political, and institutional influences. Consequently, the long-term onomastic dynamics within some of the most powerful dynasties cannot be explained by simple mechanisms…

Mechanisms of interaction in spreading models are central to our quantitative understanding of networked contagion processes, from disease transmission to opinion dynamics. Yet, while empirical data can reveal who interacts with whom, they…

Science is often portrayed as a universal and self-contained system, driven solely by the internal logic of knowledge accumulation and isolated from the turbulences of the socio-political world. In this paper, we challenge this narrative by…

Newell's simplified car-following model is known for its parsimony and behavioural interpretability, but the effects of finite interaction boundaries on parameter estimation remain poorly understood, particularly in lane-free environments.…

Rising temperatures create new challenges for local heat adaptation. Yet, it remains unclear how urban activity changes during hot periods and which urban environments people concentrate in as temperatures rise. Here, we perform a…

We study a driven selection mechanism on a fixed heavy-tailed network. At each step fresh mass is injected, its direction is recomputed from the current mass profile by a power-normalization rule, and the combined mass is transported by a…

AstroForge seeks to mine platinum group metals (PGM) from asteroids. Asteroid reserves appear to be unlimited, and at current market price the gross margin of asteroid mining would be very high. It is natural to ask: when AstroForge…

We demonstrate how the unified framework for binary-choice dynamics can be used to study the role of annealed and quenched disorders in homogeneous and heterogeneous systems. The framework defines the structure of interactions between…

Collective emotion is often inferred from the tone of mass media, but such emotion is not directly observed. One approximation is to extract sentiment from text and use sentiment indexes as proxies to study the temporal organization of news…

A proportional wealth tax acts as a uniform gravitational field on the wealth distribution: it shifts the drift of the Fokker-Planck equation without altering the diffusion, preserving the Gini coefficient at all finite times. The same…

Social pressure -- the awareness of being observed by others -- is a fundamental driver of prosocial behavior in human societies. Yet it is typically assumed that only direct neighbors exert vigilance pressure on an individual, despite…

Soccer is widely popular for its simple rules and complex yet coordinated play that unfolds on the pitch. Nevertheless, the fundamental mechanisms governing such play are not well understood: what shapes player interactions on the pitch?…