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VIDEO: The human world is, increasingly, an urban one and that means elevators. Two physicists saw this as an opportunity to explore the factors that determine elevator transport capabilities in. view more
Credit: Animation: Michael Garfield/Santa Fe Institute
The human world is, increasingly, an urban one and that means elevators. Hong Kong, the hometown of physicist Zhijie Feng (Boston University), adds new elevators at the rate of roughly 1500 every year.making vertical transport an alluring topic for quantitative research. Just in the main building of my undergraduate university, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Feng reflects, there are 37 elevators, all numbered so we can use them to indicate the location of hundreds of classrooms. There is always a line outside each elevator lobby, and if they are shut down, we have to hike for 30 minutes.
The dynamics of the neural activity of a mouse brain behave in a peculiar, unexpected way that can be theoretically modeled without any fine tuning, suggests a new paper by physicists at Emory University. Physical Review Letters published the research, which adds to the evidence that theoretical physics frameworks may aid in the understanding of large-scale brain activity.
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(Vienna, March 17, 2021) When complex systems double in size, many of their parts do not. Characteristically, some aspects will grow by only about 80 percent, others by about 120 percent. The astonishing uniformity of these two growth rates is known as scaling laws. Scaling laws are observed everywhere in the world, from biology to physical systems. They also apply to cities. Yet, while a multitude of examples show their presence, reasons for their emergence are still a matter of debate.
A new publication in the
Journal of The Royal Society Interface now provides a simple explanation for urban scaling laws: Carlos Molinero and Stefan Thurner of the