物理与社会
Cities are some of the most intricate and advanced creations of humanity. Most objects in cities are perfectly synchronised to coordinate activities such as jobs, education, transportation, entertainment, and waste management. Although each…
Prosecutors are essential in combating organized crime, making key decisions about prosecution, target selection, and structuring imputation strategies. Despite their importance, the configuration of these strategies remains empirically…
Group-based reinforcement can induce discontinuous transitions from inactive to active phases in higher-order contagion models. However, these results are typically obtained on static interaction structures or within mean-field…
The large-scale deployment of wind power is central to Europe`s energy transition but faces challenges due to its social and environmental impacts on communities. Here we assess how the tolerance of local stakeholders to such impacts…
Investment in artificial intelligence (AI) has grown rapidly, yet its returns to scientific research remain poorly understood. We study how AI reshapes the production of science using a comprehensive dataset of research proposals submitted…
Affective polarization, the emotional divide characterized by in-group love (trust towards fellow partisans) and out-group hate (mistrust towards those with opposite political views), has become prevalent in the current society. Despite its…
Parliaments dominated by two political blocs often face legislative inefficiencies as polarization increases. A central institutional question concerns how majority and supermajority rules interact with parliamentary composition to balance…
The general population systematically overestimates the size of minority groups, yet how these misperceptions vary across racial groups and geographical scales remains poorly understood. Using a purpose-built survey of the U.S. population,…
In populations with community structure, the formation of consensus requires both alignment within and diffusion of beliefs across groups, processes that evolve on distinct time scales. How do modularity, asymmetry, and polarization shape…
We introduce a method for identifying weak periodic components in pre-earthquake seismic waveforms by examining the scale-index response of a driven Duffing chaotic oscillator. This nonlinear setup helps detect and classify subtle…
The Nordic countries have adopted ambitious climate targets that imply far-reaching transformations of their power sectors, making energy system modelling and scenario analysis a central input to long-term policy analysis. At the same time,…
Opinion dynamics (OD) studies how individual opinions evolve and generate collective patterns such as consensus and polarization. While recent work explores OD using populations of LLM-based agents focusing on opinion exchange, it typically…
The growth dynamics of complex systems often exhibit statistical regularities involving power-law relationships. For real finite complex systems formed by countable tokens (animals, words) as instances of distinct types (species, dictionary…
The share of the world population living in cities with more than one million people rose from 11% in 1975 to 24% in 2025 (our estimates). Will this trend towards greater concentration in large cities continue or level off? We introduce two…
The growth of cities has traditionally been studied from a population perspective, while urban expansion-its spatial growth-has often been approached qualitatively. However, characterizing and modeling this spatial expansion is crucial,…
Modern economies require increasingly diverse and specialized skills, many of which depend on the acquisition of other skills first. Here we analyse US survey data to reveal a nested structure within skill portfolios, where the direction of…
During intergroup confrontations, agitating stimuli such as opponents' threats and provocations can trigger collective violence, even without the usual mechanisms of ingroup cooperation, such as norms with sanctions. We examine video…
In a world with ever-growing scientific literature, meaningful classifications are vital to keep on top of the latest results. In this Comment, historian and sociologist Phillip Roth traces the history of preprint classification in physics.
Political discourse attributes the pressure on European welfare systems to foreign nationals. Yet projections of service demand rarely disaggregate service demand by citizenship status. We develop a structural demographic model and project…
In 2025, the French Society for Astronomy \& Astrophysics (SF2A), gave the environmental transition commission the opportunity to share their considerations during a plenary session at the annual SF2A conference. This year, the presentation…