All articles tagged with #population dynamics
On the 50th anniversary of Robert May’s 1976 paper, this News & Views piece explains how chaotic dynamics in biology can emerge from simple mathematical models, showing that predictable, rule-based systems can yield highly unpredictable population behaviors and underscoring the enduring impact on ecology and even literature.
Avi Loeb discusses how to distinguish interstellar rocks from spacecraft based on their trajectories, analyzing the population and size of objects like 3I/ATLAS, and explores whether such objects are naturally occurring or of technological origin, with future observations expected to shed more light.
A new study by the Complexity Science Hub suggests that social disintegration and violent conflict played a crucial role in shaping the population dynamics of early farming societies in Neolithic Europe. The study concludes that periodic outbreaks of warfare, and not climate fluctuations, can account for the observed boom-bust patterns in the data. The researchers used computer simulations and compared the results with historical data to test the two rival theories attempting to explain these dynamics.