Featured
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Article
| Open AccessFinancial markets value skillful forecasts of seasonal climate
Traders of financial options bet that firms’ stock prices will be affected by forecasts of seasonal climate produced by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Firms are exposed throughout the economy, and traders spend more to hedge the news from more skillful forecasts
- Derek Lemoine
- & Sarah Kapnick
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Article
| Open AccessGlobal musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories
Human groups preserve cultural history in songs passed between generations. Here the authors show that musical histories are largely independent of the history preserved in genes and languages.
- Sam Passmore
- , Anna L. C. Wood
- & Patrick E. Savage
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Article
| Open AccessEffect of mobile food environments on fast food visits
Using large-scale mobility data, the authors examine how the quality of food in mobile environments away from home affects food choice.
- Bernardo García Bulle Bueno
- , Abigail L. Horn
- & Esteban Moro
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Article
| Open AccessEffect of trade on global aquatic food consumption patterns
Xu and colleagues find that the average trophic level of aquatic food items in the human diet is declining (from 3.42 to 3.18) because of the considerable increase in low-trophic level aquaculture species output relative to that of capture fisheries since 1976. Additionally they find that trade has contributed to increasing the availability and trophic level of aquatic foods in >60% of the world’s countries.
- Kangshun Zhao
- , Steven D. Gaines
- & Jun Xu
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Article
| Open AccessSequential stacking link prediction algorithms for temporal networks
Link prediction in temporal networks is relevant for many real-world systems, however, current approaches are usually characterized by high computational costs. The authors propose a temporal link prediction framework based on the sequential stacking of static network features, for improved computational speed, appropriate for temporal networks with completely unobserved or partially observed target layers.
- Xie He
- , Amir Ghasemian
- & Peter J. Mucha
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Article
| Open AccessImplicit racial biases are lower in more populous more diverse and less segregated US cities
Implicit biases are influenced by social contexts which, in cities, are shaped by the constraints of urban infrastructure networks. Here the authors show that more populous, more diverse, and less segregated cities are less biased and that this is predicted by a complex systems model.
- Andrew J. Stier
- , Sina Sajjadi
- & Marc G. Berman
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Article
| Open AccessModelling six sustainable development transformations in Australia and their accelerators, impediments, enablers, and interlinkages
Global research has identified six critical transformations to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Here, Allen et al model all six transformations in a national context and discuss implications for accelerating progress on the goals.
- Cameron Allen
- , Annabel Biddulph
- & Shirin Malekpour
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Article
| Open AccessIntegrating climate change induced flood risk into future population projections
Using historical data across the U.S., the authors find that population declines are associated with flood exposure. Projecting this relationship to 2053, the authors find that flood risk may result in 7% lower growth than otherwise expected.
- Evelyn G. Shu
- , Jeremy R. Porter
- & Edward Kearns
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Article
| Open AccessThe alignment of companies' sustainability behavior and emissions with global climate targets
The emissions pathways of most publicly traded companies in high-emitting sectors are not aligned with the climate targets of the Paris Agreement. An extensive analysis of companies’ sustainability behaviour offers insights into why this is the case.
- Simone Cenci
- , Matteo Burato
- & Maurizio Zollo
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Article
| Open AccessAssessing the value of integrating national longitudinal shopping data into respiratory disease forecasting models
Novel indicators of infectious disease prevalence could improve real-time surveillance and support healthcare planning. Here, the authors show that sales data for non-prescription medications from a UK high street retailer can improve the accuracy of models forecasting mortality from respiratory infections.
- Elizabeth Dolan
- , James Goulding
- & Laila J. Tata
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Article
| Open AccessSurvey of open science practices and attitudes in the social sciences
Open science practices are becoming more common in the social sciences, but there is limited data on their popularity and prevalence. Here, using survey data, the authors provide evidence that levels of adoption are relatively high and underestimated by many in the field.
- Joel Ferguson
- , Rebecca Littman
- & John-Henry Pezzuto
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Article
| Open AccessHigher convergence of human-great ape enteric eukaryotic viromes in central African forest than in a European zoo: a One Health analysis
Here, the authors conduct a multidisciplinary study of human-great ape viral sharing in Cameroon and a European zoo, finding that environmental co-use enables more enteric virome sharing, virome convergence, and adenovirus and enterovirus sharing between Cameroonian humans and apes.
- Victor Narat
- , Maud Salmona
- & Tamara Giles-Vernick
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Article
| Open AccessEstimating the impact of COVID-19 vaccine inequities: a modeling study
Global COVID-19 vaccine distribution has been inequitable. In this mathematical modelling study, the authors estimate the proportion of deaths that could have been averted in twenty low- and lower-middle-income countries if vaccines had been more widely available early in the pandemic.
- Nicolò Gozzi
- , Matteo Chinazzi
- & Alessandro Vespignani
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Article
| Open AccessSurprising combinations of research contents and contexts are related to impact and emerge with scientific outsiders from distant disciplines
Here, using hypergraph modeling the authors show that surprising research (in terms of unexpected combinations of research contents and contexts) is associated with impact and arises from scientific outsiders solving problems in distant disciplines.
- Feng Shi
- & James Evans
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Article
| Open AccessSupply chains create global benefits from improved vaccine accessibility
A more equitable global distribution of vaccines can benefit the world, while a multilateral benefit-sharing instrument needs to be developed to remove some of the disincentives for early equitable vaccines distribution globally.
- Daoping Wang
- , Ottar N. Bjørnstad
- & Nils C. Stenseth
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Comment
| Open AccessA call for immediate action to increase COVID-19 vaccination uptake to prepare for the third pandemic winter
This Comment piece summarises current challenges regarding routine vaccine uptake in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and provides recommendations on how to increase uptake. To implement these recommendations, the article points to evidence-based resources that can support health-care workers, policy makers and communicators.
- Cornelia Betsch
- , Philipp Schmid
- & Amanda Garrison
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Perspective
| Open AccessThe history of sexual selection research provides insights as to why females are still understudied
While it is widely acknowledged that Darwin’s descriptions of females were gender-biased, gender bias in modern sexual selection research is less recognized. This Perspective highlights that sexual selection theory and research are still male-centered and suggest strategies for alleviating biases in this field and beyond.
- Malin Ah-King
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Article
| Open AccessPublic attitudes value interpretability but prioritize accuracy in Artificial Intelligence
For many AI systems, it is hard to interpret how they make decisions. Here, the authors show that non-experts value interpretability in AI, especially for decisions involving high stakes and scarce resources, but they sacrifice AI interpretability when it trades off against AI accuracy.
- Anne-Marie Nussberger
- , Lan Luo
- & M. J. Crockett
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Article
| Open AccessHuman expansion into Asian highlands in the 21st Century and its effects
Most of the intensive human activities usually occur in lowlands. Here the authors report that human activity expansions also were widely distributed in Asian highlands in the 21st century and held dual effects, which provides new insights for regional human activity expansions.
- Chao Yang
- , Huizeng Liu
- & Guofeng Wu
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Article
| Open AccessCross-cutting scenarios and strategies for designing decarbonization pathways in the transport sector toward carbon neutrality
New study shows how region-specific policy under the Avoid–Shift–Improve framework may aid in realizing a deep decarbonization in the transport sector and assist in achieving China’s carbon neutrality goals.
- Runsen Zhang
- & Tatsuya Hanaoka
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| Open AccessOptions for reforming agricultural subsidies from health, climate, and economic perspectives
Springmann and Freund use an integrated modelling framework to show that coupling agricultural subsidies to producing foods with beneficial health and environmental characteristics can improve population health and lower greenhouse gas emissions without reducing economic welfare.
- M. Springmann
- & F. Freund
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Article
| Open AccessThe geography of intergenerational social mobility in Britain
Intergenerational preconditions and historical conferment of opportunity play a role in social mobility. This study considers the geography of relative deprivation to show how different family groups across Great Britain experience different intergenerational outcomes.
- Paul A. Longley
- , Justin van Dijk
- & Tian Lan
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Article
| Open AccessENSO impacts child undernutrition in the global tropics
The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) influences the weather around the world and, therefore, has strong impacts on society. Here, the authors show that ENSO is associated with child nutrition in many countries, with warmer El Niño conditions leading to more child undernutrition in large parts of the developing world.
- Jesse K. Anttila-Hughes
- , Amir S. Jina
- & Gordon C. McCord
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Article
| Open AccessScientific prizes and the extraordinary growth of scientific topics
Scientific revolutions have famously inspired scientists and innovation but large-scale analyses of scientific revolutions in modern science are rare. Here, the authors investigate one possible factor connected with a topic’s extraordinary growth—scientific prizes.
- Ching Jin
- , Yifang Ma
- & Brian Uzzi
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Article
| Open AccessUnderstanding the onset of hot streaks across artistic, cultural, and scientific careers
Despite their ubiquitous nature across a wide range of creative domains, it remains unclear if there is any regularity underlying the beginning of successful periods in a career. Here, the authors develop computational methods to trace the career outputs of artists, film directors, and scientists and explore how they move in their creative space along their career trajectory.
- Lu Liu
- , Nima Dehmamy
- & Dashun Wang
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Comment
| Open AccessGlobal catastrophic risk from lower magnitude volcanic eruptions
Globalisation supports the clustering of critical infrastructure systems, sometimes in proximity to lower-magnitude (VEI 3–6) volcanic centres. In this emerging risk landscape, moderate volcanic eruptions might have cascading, catastrophic effects. Risk assessments ought to be considered in this light.
- Lara Mani
- , Asaf Tzachor
- & Paul Cole
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Article
| Open AccessInvestigating the role of group-based morality in extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice
Understanding motivations underlying acts of hatred are essential for developing strategies to prevent such acts against marginalized groups. Here the authors show that group-based moral values are associated with tendency to justify extreme behavioural expressions of prejudice.
- Joe Hoover
- , Mohammad Atari
- & Morteza Dehghani
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Article
| Open AccessTriadic embeddedness structure in family networks predicts mobile communication response to a sudden natural disaster
Here, the authors use mobile telecom data to study communication in family networks after a natural disaster, and find that the structural configuration of families’ social tie sharing predicted their post-disaster communications dynamics.
- Jayson S. Jia
- , Yiwei Li
- & Jianmin Jia
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Article
| Open AccessUniversal resilience patterns in labor markets
Recent technological, social, and educational changes are profoundly impacting our work, but what makes labour markets resilient to those labour shocks? Here, the authors show that labour markets resemble ecological systems whose resilience depends critically on the network of skill similarities between different jobs.
- Esteban Moro
- , Morgan R. Frank
- & Iyad Rahwan
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Article
| Open AccessAn ecological approach to structural flexibility in online communication systems
Human perceptual and cognitive abilities are limited resources and consequently cheaply available information translates into hypercompetition for rewarding outcomes. Here the authors show, with empirical analysis and an ecological model, that actors-memes ecosystems evolve towards a narrow set of emergent, natural network patterns.
- María J. Palazzi
- , Albert Solé-Ribalta
- & Javier Borge-Holthoefer
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Article
| Open AccessTropical cyclone exposure is associated with increased hospitalization rates in older adults
Tropical cyclones can cause severe damage and can thus have devastating impacts on societies. Here, the authors use Medicare data to show that tropical cyclone exposure in the United States is associated with increased hospitalization rates for older adults from many different acute causes.
- Robbie M. Parks
- , G. Brooke Anderson
- & Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou
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Article
| Open AccessInequality is rising where social network segregation interacts with urban topology
Not much is known about the joint relationships between social network structure, urban geography, and inequality. Here, the authors analyze an online social network and find that the fragmentation of social networks is significantly higher in towns in which residential neighborhoods are divided by physical barriers such as rivers and railroads.
- Gergő Tóth
- , Johannes Wachs
- & Balázs Lengyel
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Perspective
| Open AccessSensing the future of bio-informational engineering
Synthetic biology engineering principles enable two-way communication between living and inanimate substrates. Here the authors consider the development of this bio-informational exchange and propose cyber-physical architectures and applications.
- Thomas A. Dixon
- , Thomas C. Williams
- & Isak S. Pretorius
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Perspective
| Open AccessFarming fish in the sea will not nourish the world
Marine aquaculture is widely proposed as compatible with ocean sustainability, biodiversity conservation, and human nutrition goals. In this Perspective, Belton and colleagues dispute the empirical validity of such claims and contend that the potential of marine aquaculture has been much exaggerated.
- Ben Belton
- , David C. Little
- & Shakuntala H. Thilsted
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Article
| Open AccessProsociality predicts labor market success around the world
Previous research on the importance of prosociality is based on observations from WEIRD societies, questioning the generalizability of these findings. Here the authors present a global investigation of the relation between prosociality and labor market success and generalize the positive relation to a wide geographical context.
- Fabian Kosse
- & Michela M. Tincani
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Article
| Open AccessEvolution of the Chinese guarantee network under financial crisis and stimulus program
The systemic risk of real-world financial networks is understudied. Here the authors focused on the guarantee network among Chinese firms and found that the global financial crisis during 2007-2008 and economic policies in the aftermath had significant influence on the evolution of guarantee network structure.
- Yingli Wang
- , Qingpeng Zhang
- & Xiaoguang Yang
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Article
| Open AccessThe effects of contemporaneous peer punishment on cooperation with the future
Little is known about decentralized institutions that could facilitate cooperation for the sake of future generations. Here, the authors show that allowing for peer punishment within a generation is only partially successful in facilitating cooperation for the sake of later generations.
- Johannes Lohse
- & Israel Waichman
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Article
| Open AccessA behavioral approach to instability pathways in financial markets
Phenomena like imitation, herding and positive feedbacks in the complex financial markets characterize the emergence of endogenous instabilities, which however is still understudied. Here the authors show that the graph-based approach is helpful to timely recognize phases of increasing instability that can drive the system to a new market configuration.
- Alessandro Spelta
- , Andrea Flori
- & Fabio Pammolli
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Article
| Open AccessStronger policy required to substantially reduce deaths from PM2.5 pollution in China
Chinese government has implemented the air pollution control measure-the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan in 2013, whose effects have not been fully studied. Here the authors show that from 2013 to 2017, the plan has achieved substantial public health benefits.
- Huanbi Yue
- , Chunyang He
- & Brett A. Bryan
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Article
| Open AccessSaving less in China facilitates global CO2 mitigation
The partial effects of saving rate changes on CO2 emissions remain unclear. Here the authors found that the increase in saving rates of China has led to increments of global industrial CO2 emissions by 189 million tonnes (Mt) during 2007-2012, while global CO2 emissions would be reduced by 186 Mt if the saving rates of China decreased by 15 percentage points.
- Chen Lin
- , Jianchuan Qi
- & Zhifeng Yang
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Article
| Open AccessFriendship paradox biases perceptions in directed networks
Individuals within social networks rarely observe the network as a whole; rather, their observations are limited to their social circles. Here we show that network structure can distort observations, making a trait appear far more common within many social circles than it is in the network as a whole.
- Nazanin Alipourfard
- , Buddhika Nettasinghe
- & Kristina Lerman
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Article
| Open AccessGlobal urban expansion offsets climate-driven increases in terrestrial net primary productivity
Robust estimates of either urban expansion worldwide or the effects of such phenomenon on terrestrial net primary productivity (NPP) are lacking. Here the authors used the new dataset of global land use to show that the global urban areas expanded largely between 2000 and 2010, which in turn reduced terrestrial NPP globally.
- Xiaoping Liu
- , Fengsong Pei
- & Zhu Liu
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Article
| Open AccessEarly coauthorship with top scientists predicts success in academic careers
By examining publication records of scientists from four disciplines, the authors show that coauthoring a paper with a top-cited scientist early in one's career predicts lasting increases in career success, especially for researchers affiliated with less prestigious institutions.
- Weihua Li
- , Tomaso Aste
- & Giacomo Livan
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Article
| Open AccessStructural balance emerges and explains performance in risky decision-making
How do socially polarized systems change and how does a change in polarization relate to performance? Using instant messaging data and performance records from day traders, the authors find that certain relations are prone to balance and that balance is associated with better trading decisions.
- Omid Askarisichani
- , Jacqueline Ng Lane
- & Brian Uzzi
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Article
| Open AccessIntroducing risk inequality metrics in tuberculosis policy development
Failure to account for heterogeneity in TB risk can mislead model-based evaluation of proposed interventions. Here, the authors introduce a metric to estimate the distribution of risk in populations from routinely collected data and find that variation in infection acquisition is the most impactful.
- M. Gabriela M. Gomes
- , Juliane F. Oliveira
- & Christian Lienhardt
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Article
| Open AccessQuantifying and predicting success in show business
For most actors sustained productivity defines success. Here the authors study the careers of actors and identify a "rich-get-richer" mechanism with respect to productivity, the emergence of hot streaks and the presence of gender bias, and are able to predict whether the most productive year of an actor is yet to come.
- Oliver E. Williams
- , Lucas Lacasa
- & Vito Latora
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Article
| Open AccessThe ecological drivers of variation in global language diversity
Could similar ecological and biogeographic drivers explain the distributions of biological diversity and human cultural diversity? The authors explore ecological correlates of human language diversity, finding strong support for a role of high year-round productivity but less support for landscape features.
- Xia Hua
- , Simon J. Greenhill
- & Lindell Bromham
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Article
| Open AccessUrbanity and the dynamics of language shift in Galicia
In areas with two or more spoken languages, linguistic shift may occur as speakers of one language switch to the other. Here, the authors show that linguistic shift is faster in rural compared to urban regions of Galicia, a bilingual community in Spain, due to the competition of internal complexity and network relevance.
- Mariamo Mussa Juane
- , Luis F. Seoane
- & Jorge Mira