Physics Buzz

“Do we really have to live with this?” Like many of us, that’s what Dr. Neil Johnson wondered when the news highlighted yet another seemingly random violent terrorist attack back in 2014. But unlike many of us, he and his colleagues turned to science in search of an answer.

We often rely on shapes and patterns when navigating the world. Poison ivy or an innocent plant? A nasty rash or the imprint of the textured wall you were leaning against? Similarly, scientists often use shapes and patterns to interpret datasets. Do the points follow a straight line? Appear in clusters? On the street and in the lab, shapes help us organize information, interpret data, and even make predictions.

Like a complex highway system, a network of vessels carries blood from the heart to all corners of your body and back again. This “distribution network” is not only complicated, it is also huge and astoundingly efficient. Even when one part of the body is injured, flow to and from the rest of the body is rarely interrupted.

Neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have provided evidence opposing the current model for how working memory operates at the cellular level. The current model says the cellular basis for working memory lies in consistent, sustained activity by brain cells, or neurons. Results from the MIT study , published in the March 17 issue of the scientific journal Neuron, shows the story is more complex, that brain cells involved in working-memory tasks are activated discretely and sporadically.

Swarming behavior has always fascinated physicists, biologists, and behavioral scientists alike—as well as anyone who’s seen a sky-darkening flock of starlings twist into its mesmerizing shapes . It’s hard not to wonder how such elegantly concerted behavior arises on the fly, or how on earth the birds keep from running into one another. But birds aren’t the only things that swarm like this, and while the idea of The Birds acting as a collective is scary enough to merit a Hitchcock film, this might just be a psychological sublimation of the instinctive fear of a very real and far-more-threatening swarm: Locusts. Now, research from the University of Bath gives us some understanding of how this swarming behavior happens in insects, and how we might disrupt it.

This week on The Physics Central Podcast we're talking about the ancient Chinese game of Go. Researchers in France want to model the game as a complex network. Other examples of complex networks include airplane flight plans, social networks, neurons in the brain, and fungal communities, to name a few. By modeling Go as a complex network, the researchers hope to find patterns and symmetries that could assist scientists who are working on Go-playing programs, that they hope will some day beat the best human Go players (something that already been accomplished in Chess). To learn more about the game of Go check out  Sensei's Library and Go Game Guru ; here's an article about a computer program that beat a master Go player, but only because the computer played with a handicap; an article about computers trying to beat humans at go and some of the science related to the game; here's the clip from A Beautiful Mind I referenced in the podcast; and here's some inf