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The Thursday Complexity Post or the TCP as we have come to affectionately call it, is a short, timely, sometimes provocative posting on topics of interest to members. This electronic posting could be about an interesting complexity news item, a significant new book or article, an important development in science, an accomplishment by a member of the Plexus community, or simply something intriguing. With your membership in Plexus you will be sent this message weekly and usually it is on Thursday. The TCP is designed to get you thinking and keep you in touch with current developments in the field. Readers are invited to jump in and respond to the TCP’s topic on the list serve that serves the majority of our members.

Thursday Complexity Post - Job Loss and Life Expectancy

Research suggests layoffs can have adverse health effects, both short term and long term. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Job Loss and Life Expectancy

Research suggests layoffs can have adverse health effects, both short term and long term. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - A City of Complexity

"A place of healing, since tuberculosis sufferers started coming over a century ago. A spiritual mini-mecca for a godless age. A sumptuous adobe haven for a few super rich. A land of hope for thousands of illegal immigrants. A hothouse of talent and IQ, with an extraordinary concentration of PhDs, and more artist than any other American city its size." .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Bats Die, Insects Live

An emerging contagious disease called White Nose Syndrome (WNS) is killing hundreds of thousands of bats a year in the Northeastern United States, and scientists worry that some species could become extinct in coming decades.
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Thursday Complexity Post - Bundle Up and Believe

Can climate change skeptics get a warm glow from waste-deep snow? .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Natural Networks

What living organism can solve complex network engineering problems despite having no brain? .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Mapping the Republic of Letters

In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe and America, a network of scholars, scientists, theologians and literary figures who exchanged ideas across decades and national boundaries formed the basis of an intellectual community known as the Republic of Letters. Now humanities scholars are collaborating with technology specialists and "cyberscholars" to reach a deeper understanding of that metaphysical republic. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Pacific Gyre

Inspired by scientific exploration of the Great Garbage Patch in theNorth Pacific Gyre, artist Anna Helper has created extraordinary huge, haunting and disturbing translucent structures from plastic waste from a local salvage yard. Her woven cloud-like mass, called The Gyre, was displayed at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Cellular rogues and enablers

Biological cells may react to their environments somewhat akin to the way children are influenced by their neighborhoods and schools, an increasing number of scientists believe. Cell biologist Mina Bissell believes a key element in the formation of cancer is not just what happens within a cell, but the interactions of cells and all the tissue surrounding them. With certain environmental changes, cancer cells that might have remained harmless can flourish. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Obesity and a Hormone Symphony

The hormones that govern metabolism and other vital bodily functions act like “individual musicians playing together in a philharmonic orchestra producing the most melodic, beautiful symphonies,” an endocrinologist says. Understanding the complex interplay has already led to a new diabetes therapy, and may eventually help curtail obesity. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Nano Rocks

What began with an American Chemical Society contest has blossomed into joyous song and dance production teamwork that celebrates science with the sort of sophisticated silliness that sticks in the memory. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Music, Art and Complexity

If you missed the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra recent concert at Carnegie Hall, you can repair that loss here. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Ancient Brands, Modern Logos

Commercial brands began some 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia when traders needed some assurance of the value and origins of oils, wines and other products, an anthropologist believes. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Silver Spoons

Material wealth is easily passed from one generation to the next, and societies that place high value on material goods have the highest income inequalities, according to a team of anthropologists, statisticians and economists. The team also found that the "silver spoon effect"-the benefit bestowed on the offspring of wealthy parents-was well established in some of the world's most ancient economies. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Fewer boys

Men aren't an endangered species yet, but scientists are puzzled by a decline in the number of boy babies born in recent decades. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Brain at Work

The brain is a social organ, workplaces are social systems, and scientific research is producing more understanding of why employees who feel isolated, unrewarded, unfairly treated or oppressively controlled can't fully engaged in their work. Leaders and managers who value high performance can learn how to address the social brain in productive ways that avoid neurological sabotage. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Social Networks

Bacterial and viral illnesses spread in human communities. But what about physical fitness, happiness, sadness and habits such as smoking, drinking and eating too much? .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Cities and Brains

Dense interconnectedness is critical to the evolution and growth of both brains and cities, according to a new research by scientists at Rensselaer ploytechnic Institute..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Antibiotic Resistance in your Gut

Researchers have discovered previously unknown genes for antibiotic resistance lurking in the human gut. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - PBS News Hour Features Billings Clinic

The PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer has featured the Billings Clinic as an example of how high quality health care can be provided at relatively low cost. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Partnership Perfected by Practice

The ancient partnership of horse and rider that has inspired warriors, artists and poets, has been something of a mystery to science. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Unexpected Whirlwinds Ravage

The similar dynamics of tsunamis and earthquakes and ruptures in manmade system such as economies and electric power grids may have profound implications for future planners and policy makers. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Anxious You May Sweat But Others Will Empathize

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived." Helen Keller, American author and educator, who was blind and deaf..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Cheetahs

The cheetah has an asymmetrical gait, observes Penny Hudson, and when it gallops "it does different things with either side of its body." .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Stories of Scientists

People devoted to breakthrough discoveries in science often have wisdom and mystery of equal depth and complexity in their own lives. At the recent World Science Festival in New York, two Nobel Laureates and two neurobiologists were among those who distilled their personal stories for a rapt audience. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Neuroscience of time

The American physicist John Archibald Wheeler observed that time is what prevents everything from happening at once. Researchers are now beginning to suspect that impaired time perception is important in a wide range of psychological ills. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Scientists Probe the Mysteries of Scaling

What does the borough of Manhattan have in common with a mouse? As Steven Srogatz explains it, they are “variations on a single structural theme.” .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Crowdsourcing

After the disputed election of President Mwai Kibaki in December 2007, violence and looting swept the normally stable country of Kenya, killing hundreds of people and displacing thousands. News from conventional sources was temporarily unavailable. In the midst of the chaos, a small group of tech savvy young Africans created a real-time reporting system that has since been used for relief efforts in other crises and natural disasters. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Baltimore and Bangladesh

The United States ranks second out of 177 countries in per capita income—behind Luxembourg—but 34th in the survival of infants to age one. The United States spends $5.2 billion a day on healthcare, more than any other nation in the world, yet ranks 24th among the world’s 30 most affluent nations for life expectancy. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Diversity helps birds solve problems

People in groups have been shown to solve problems faster than individuals. Now researchers have found the same is true of house sparrows, and for birds too, diversity is key. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - World Water Safety

Hundreds of millions of people face increased risk of disease and extreme poverty because they lack access to clean water and basic sanitation, a United Nations report warns. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Clostridium difficile a growing threat

Clostridium difficile, a contagious and potentially deadly pathogen, isn’t just increasingly resistant to antibiotics. It’s often triggered by antibiotic treatment. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Love, Art, Neuroscience

The tragic twelfth century love story of Heloise and Peter Abelard is still irresistibly intriguing. She was a brilliant young student, and he was a famous philosopher and theologian nearly twice her age. They fell in love, had a child and married in secret. Her enraged family had him castrated. They retreated to separate monasteries, and years later continued their love in letters. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Space Junk

How dangerous could a bit of litter the size of a corn kernel be? In outer space, very. A minuscule fleck of paint traveling at orbital speed can smash the windshield of a space satellite. And NASA mathematicians say something as small as a grain of sand can have an impact equivalent to the power of a bowling ball moving at 100 miles per hour. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Money Madness is No Oxymoron

The very thought or mention of money activates some ancient emotional areas of our brains, some scientists believe..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Pigs, People and MRSA

When a family physician in a small town in Indiana started seeing scores of patients with MRSA infections, he began to wonder whether nearby hog farms were incubating and spreading the disease. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Renewing Habitats

Willie Smits’s passionate desire to save orangutans from extinction led to an unceasing campaign to transform the scorched earth of Borneo into a new natural habitat—one plot of land and one tree at a time. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Tweeting

Dr. Craig Roberts, a surgeon at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit wanted people to know that a tumor can be removed from a kidney without a radical nephrectomy..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Ethics, Ecosystems and Elk

Is human kindness endangering the future of the magnificent elk? .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Locusts in transformation

The brain chemical serotonin triggers one of nature’s most astounding transformations, which happens when solitary placid desert locusts converge into terrifying plant-devouring swarms, scientists have found. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Marine Relationships Matter

Leaders can’t lead without followers, but their mutual needs may be even more complex than that. Interactions among leaders and followers can strengthen the skills of both. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Colds & Flu

While colds and flu are far more common in winter, we’ve been told for years that cold weather doesn’t make us sick. Now researchers have discovered that cold contributes to the spread of the influenza virus, which does. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Small Acts Raise Survival Odds

One could hardly watch film of United Airways Flight 1549 ditching in the Hudson River without feeling visceral terror and exceptional gratitude for a pilot with the incredible skill to avoid populous city streets and land safely on water. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - End of Life Care

The medical care people receive near the end of their lives may be more related to their addresses than their preferences, according to The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, which documents surprising regional differences in the cost and quality of managing chronic and serious illness. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Giving

Ancient Romans exchanged twigs from sacred groves around the time of the winter solstice, and northern Europeans celebrated fertility with yuletide gifts of wheat products, such as breads and alcohol. The Roman Emperor Caligula is said to have demanded New Years presents and then publicly ridiculed those he disdained, and ungrateful potentates have been known to punish those whose generosity left them dissatisfied. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Fractals for Kids

The unclassifiable genius Benoit Mandelbrot recalls having a youthful fascination with things that were rough—things that were irregular, variable, and fragmented, that lacked the perfect shapes of Euclidean geometry. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Cellular Altruism

Do individual organisms, even at the cellular level, sacrifice their own advantage to give an evolutionary edge to their species? Gad Shaulsky has always been both skeptical and deeply curious about the paradox of altruism in biological species. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Behavioral Economics

Have you ever driven miles out of the way to get cheaper gas? Economized on groceries then impulsively bought bargain priced gourmet cat food in such bulk your cat won’t live long enough to eat it? Have you used your $100 a month gym membership for a workout then undone that all that virtue with a $10 pizza purchase on the way home? .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Ancient herb, new use

A drug extracted from the root of the astragalus plant, which has been used in Chinese medicine for centuries, has helped immune cells fight HIV and may also slow the aging process. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Cumulative Advantage

The Nineteenth Century mathematician Henri Poincare wrote that his path-breaking insight into non-Euclidian geometry came to him in a flash as he boarded a bus. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Economic Turbulence

The cataclysmic failures of American financial institutions may trigger world wide repercussions with chain reactions never before even imagined, two leading scholars say. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Circadian clock and memory

If you’re having trouble remembering things, your circadian clock may be out of order. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Buchanan on financial markets

Facing financial crisis and an unprecedented $700 billion taxpayer bailing out of Wall Street, public officials, financiers, and ordinary citizens are struggling to make sense of the mess and figure out what to do. But even the best and the brightest can’t agree on what will happen next.
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Thursday Complexity Post - Pleistocene Park

When elephants, zebras, giraffes and other large vegetarian animals are removed from an environment, plant matter increases, insect populations zoom, and so do the numbers of lizards and beetles and other bug-eating creatures. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Hospital discharge communications

A new study finds that 78 per cent of patients discharged from hospital emergency rooms are unclear about some element of their condition or treatment, and more than one third don’t fully understand how to take care of themselves at home. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Super-human intelligence

Could computers become so powerful that a new emergent super-intelligence could vastly outshine and outperform mere humans? .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Healing Relationships

Healing relationships between doctors and patients have certain underlying structures that may also be common to healing relationship in general, a recent study suggests. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Neuroscience technology

The interface of human brains and computers, electronic cognitive enhancement and neuroscience technology enabling mind controlled machinery and telepathic communication are no longer the exclusive domain of science fiction writers. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - African fractals

When he came across an article abut the relationship between housing patterns and women’s autonomy in Tanzania, Ron Eglash was intrigued. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Those Big Little Things

For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Microbes, maggots and superbugs

Think of the people you know who are here today because their lives, or the lives of their forebears, were saved by antibiotics. Imagine how different their families and communities would be without them. Then envision a future where once-vanquished diseases triumph over medical effort. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Creativity at the Edge

Mark Bent is a former diplomat and Texas oilman whose experiences in impoverished villages and settlements in Africa led him to research inexpensive artificial light. He founded SunNight Solar, a company that developed a solar powered flashlight. Then he teamed with InnoCentive, a company that connects challenges and solutions and improved the product. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Worms may help health

The humble hookworm may hold some clues to the workings of the human immune system. In fact, some of the parasites we’ve learned to loathe may play a key role in human health. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Do languages have a common ancestor?

The modern English, Finnish and Turkish languages may not be much alike, but some scholars believe their linguistic ancestors may have a great deal in common. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Empowered Workers Perform Best

People who feel powerful perform better on cognitive tasks than people who feel unimportant, new research suggests. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Living Computers

Ordinary e coli bacteria can cause a great deal of trouble when it’s on your spinach. But scientists have discovered how to make e coli do math, opening the way to potentially extraordinary advances in storing and manipulating data. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Can memory be too good?

When Oscar Wilde said memory is the diary we all carry within us, he probably hadn’t imagined anyone like Jill Price, a 42-year-old California woman who remembers nearly every detail of every day of her life since she as eight years old. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Stuart Kauffman's new book

“A couple in love waling along the banks of the Seine, are in real fact, a couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine, not mere particles in motion.”.
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Thursday Complexity Post - Legacy of Edward Lorenz

When Edward Lorenz accidentally discovered the “Butterfly Effect”, he knew he had hit upon something profound. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - John Wheeler's legacy

John Archibald Wheeler, a visionary in physics, science and philosophy, and a legendary teacher, was as imaginative with metaphor as he was with mathematics. He may be best known for coining the phrase “black hole” to describe what happens when a star collapses, creating space where mass is so densely compacted that nothing—not even light—can escape its gravitational force. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Addiction to calories

When you want that chocolate chip cookie dough ice-cream blizzard instead of the diet soda, your brain’s neural circuitry may be partly to blame. New research suggests that calories by themselves are addictive. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Predators, Prey and Flying Cats

In the early 1950s, the World Health Organization saved people in Borneo from malaria and presented them instead with the threat of plague and typhus..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Tech Savvy New Workers

After the Department of Defense blocked troop access to 13 popular web sites, including YouTube and MySpace, senior officers were aghast to discover their junior colleagues were using Facebook, which had escaped the ban, to organize their squadrons..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Weaker Work Ties

Americans don’t have as many friends at work as they did decades ago, recent research suggests. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Microbes in the Sky

Microbes have been founding arctic ice, in the water cores of nuclear reactors, and in volcanic undersea vents where the searing water temperature exceeds the boiling point. Now some scientists think the water in clouds should be viewed as a microbial habitat. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Ages of Love

Research from 72 countries suggests people tend to have a U shaped life cycle, with middle aged misery and happiness during youth and old age, according to two prominent economists. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Doing and Learning

The existence and expansion of networks, Jay Cross suggests, changes the way we view the world. “Reality” he writes, “emerges from the interaction of complex adaptive systems.” .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Can you Vote Your Conscience

There certainly are rational reasons to vote, and three professors, Aaron Edlin, Andrew Gelman and Noah Kaplan, analyze them in a Rationality and Society essay complete with charts and equations. If individuals have social preferences and are concerned about the welfare of others, they say, it is rational for them to go to the polls even in very large elections where the probability of casting a decisive vote is minuscule. In addition to the positive feelings of an enhanced sense of civic responsibility, the authors cite research suggesting voters consider themselves members of large affinity groups whose well-being they can influence at the ballot box. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Election Cascades

Network dynamics and a social phenomenon known as “cumulative advantage” influence electoral victories more than rational choice, some social scientists believe. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - MRSA in Pigs

Researchers in Canada and Europe have found Methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in pigs and the farmers who care for them, and Michael Pollan suggests that discovery is emblematic of the fact that we ask too much of our pigs. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - What Compels Creatures to Navigate Perilious Journeys En Masse?

Millions of Monarch butterflies come together every fall over a 50-mile-wide valley in Texas to make their way to the mountains of central Mexico. The astonishing sight is part of an arduous nonlinear journey from Canada and North America in which creatures that weigh little more than an ounce defy the dangers of storms, high winds, predatory birds, and hostile habitats. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Doing Good and Doing Well

Educational, economic, and environmental innovators, as well as organizations working to support human rights, reduce poverty and promote health are among the 45 winners of the 2008 Fast Company Social Capitalist Award. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Cybernetics

Cybernetics quite emphatically differs from robotics, and it is not about freezing dead people. That has to do with cryogenics. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Simple rules of swarms

No matter how closely one examines an army ant, Iain Couzin observes, there is no way to guess that when 1.5 million of them get together they can use their bodies to build bridges and then dismantle them when their travels are finished. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - For want of wolves

The wolves were gone, so the elk and antelope grazed safety on young cottonwoods, aspen and willow trees, killing them before they could mature. When the trees and shrubs that control stream erosion were gone, entire ecosystems were disturbed. Beaver dams declined, food webs broke down, and a chain of disruptions rippled through other plant and animal species that included birds, fish and insects. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - The Promise of Systems Biology

Systems biology research may lead the way to greater understanding of health and disease and raise the potential for specially targeted medical treatments tailored to individual needs. Ancient healers knew illnesses rarely arose from a single cause and that context was vital. Advanced mathematical models now validate that view. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Infastrstructures interrelated

Hundreds of thousands of California residents went without power in the wake of the devastating fires that swept the state this week. But wildfires aren't the only threats to the power grid. Sporadic failures traced to power surges darkened downtown San Francisco in July, and a year earlier more than 200 airline flights were diverted, delayed or canceled because of an 80 minute power outage at a radar facility that handles flights in and out of Southern California..
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Thursday Complexity Post - A Pox on Parties?

Have you ever been to a chickenpox party? Some adults think deliberately exposing young children to common childhood diseases helps build stronger immune systems and is safer than giving them vaccines. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Jazz and Medical Communication

Paul Haidet, a physician, former disc jockey and amateur jazz historian who has studied doctor-patient communication, marvels at the parallels between jazz and medicine. Gary Onady, a physician and jazz trumpeter who composes and arranges music, uses musical metaphor to describe patient-clinician interactions. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Starfish & Spider

It would be easy to miss the metaphysical connection between Napster, the pioneer of electronic file sharing, and the Apache Indians of the American West. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Bacterial Networks

The social behavior of bacterial cells and the networks they form may hold keys to fighting deadly diseases and producing cleaner fuels. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Odes to Code

Poets have always excelled in seeing the secret, the sublime and the subliminal, but how do they do with science? .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Readers Converse Online

Tim Spalding thinks learning and knowledge are conversation, and his concept is nuanced by technical savvy and classical scholarship. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Gowns, Gloves and Culture Change

The VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System (VAPHS) has reduced hospital infections and saved money in the process, a New York Times story reports today. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Deeper Learning Bob Lindberg

A patient seeing Dr. Robert A. Lindberg for the first time gets an unusual introduction to his medical practice. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Genes Interact in Networks

Scientists learning more about the human genetic blueprint have discovered they know less than they thought, and much of what they thought needs revision..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Swarm Intelligence

Ants have sophisticated divisions of labor within their colonies and contrary to popular myth they have no rigid roles of worker, warrior, or nurturer. In fact, there is no one in charge. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Shadows

When we see a shadow of our images, wonders Bill Nye the Science Guy, are we seeing the time 11 minutes ago on Mars, or are we seeing the time on earth observed from Mars now? When is now? When was then? And what is a shadow? .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Melodious Duets

To the poet Shelley, the sounds of the skylark were "profuse strains of unpremeditated art," that held intimations of heavenly things unseen. Recent research shows that what may be ethereal to the human ear is very serious business to birds..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Forgetting

Our ability to forget may be just as important as our ability to remember. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Romantic Love

Scientists are finding that romantic love is quite distinct from sexual desire. Neurologically, it's more akin to the drives for food, drink, warmth, and the craving for certain drugs. When love strikes, the huge chemical cocktail that constitutes our body is set in motion, and neuroscientists are beginning to find what goes on in our brains as a result. And don't be surprised in romantic misery makes you crave chocolate-the reason lies in chemistry. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Lightning sparks hurricanes

Severe lightning in the Ethiopian highlands gives birth to the most devastating Atlantic hurricanes, new research suggests. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Queen Bees

The queen honeybee has the worst job in the hive, muses May R. Berenbaum, a professor of entomology at the University of Illinois. "At least the foragers get out for fresh air and some scenery.".
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Thursday Complexity Post - Mind and emergence

Why are family reunions and holiday gatherings so often prone to free-floating angst, irrational episodes and inexplicable outbursts? .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Your Kids and Your Aging Ears

The Struldbrugs who lived in Jonathan Swift's fanciful island of Luggnagg, were immortal but not perpetually young. They entered their everlasting dotage forgetting the names of people and things. And because the Luggnagg language of Balnibarbi was in constant flux, successive generations of Struldbrugs couldn't communicate with each other, and none of them could communicate with their mortal neighbors..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Ancient Amphitheater's

The voices and music of performers on the open-air stage at the ancient Greek theater of Asklepios of Epidaurus rise with nearly magical clarity even to people sitting in the back rows nearly 200 feet away. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Keep Your Bucket Full

Revelers in their cups may forget responsibilities, and people traveling by hot air balloon can view the world giddily from a suspended basket. But the old oaken bucket elicits reassuring notions of strength and reliability. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Brain Architecture Supports Subjective Experience

How does the infinitely complex system of interacting networks with 100 billion neurons and 60 trillion synapses in the human brain allow us to think, feel, remember and develop social emotions and moral perspectives? .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Bad Bugs Hit the Wall and Bite the Dust

In the battle of mankind against microbes, scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a highly sophisticated way to deliver an unambiguously primitive death to bad bugs-poke them full of holes..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Small Changes Impact Ecology

In the tiny village of Bitinga in eastern Niger, every man, women and child is engaged in a struggle to alter the earth. They are planting bushes to try and halt the advance of a huge sand dune more than 300 feet high that stretches for a mile and a quarter and threatens to bury their community and a new school..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Honey bees dying

Honey bees, with their complex social order and their amazing architectural achievements, have inspired admiration, poetry and scientific inquiry ever since we humans discovered the sweet taste of honey. This year honey bees are dying in droves and scientists are not sure why. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Ethical Eco-Gold

Say that band you wear on your ring finger to symbolize an endless circle of love contains an ounce of gold. To get that ounce, miners dig, haul and heap an average of 30 tons of rock. Those tons of rock, along with two or three times as many tons of excavated earth, create artificial mountains, which are then lined with irrigation hoses that apply millions of gallons of cyanide to separate out the precious metal. Environmentally devastating open pit gold mines remain toxic for years, contaminating surrounding land and groundwater. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Microbe Challanges

Scientists are discovering wild, unpredictable behavior in invisible microbial communities where organisms collaborate, compete, communicate, and pirate each others' strategies for coping with adversity. While no evidence exists to suggest single-cell consciousness, bacteria and viruses can adapt to environmental challenges with astonishing speed and resourcefulness.
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Thursday Complexity Post - Scientists and Theologians Unite for Environment

Eric Chivian and Richard Cizik have differing views on how the earth was formed and the origin of human life. But they agree that unprecedented human effort is needed to protect all the living things on the planet and all the fragile ecosystems that support them. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Melting Arctic imperils tropical isles

Arctic explorers once led expeditions on dogsled. Today many such adventurers paddle kayaks instead, and the change has vast implications. Diminishing Arctic ice may herald the inundation of distant tropical Pacific islands and low-lying coastal cities worldwide. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Appreciative Inquiry

Newark Beth Israel Medical Center has 80,000 emergency visits a year and more than 60 percent of its patients are admitted through the emergency department. So this urban 673-bed teaching hospital, an affiliate of the Saint Barnabas Health Care System, was an ideal place to pilot a strengths based approach to the improvement of "hand-offs"-the movement of a patient from one part of the hospital to another..
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Thursday Complexity Post - DMan Programme

The Complexity and Management Centre at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom is internationally known for its work on complexity theory and organisations. It is also distinguished in that it offers professional research degree programmes in which the candidates' work is their research. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Season's Greetings

The mistletoe that gives permission for stolen Christmas kisses has a botanical and cultural past rich in mystery, paradox and lusty ceremonies. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Constraints & Innovations

In Cambodia, one out of every 380 people is a war amputee. In Afghanistan, thousands of men, women and children have lost legs because of the exploding landmines that still litter the country after nearly three decades of war, and Taliban courts have ordered amputation of hands and feet as punishment. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - The Humanity of Animals

Scientists are finding more and more animals that have characteristics once thought to be exclusively human. And it's not only dolphins and great apes, the animals whose social natures have already been well documented..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Complex Ecosystems

The "Great Dying" of 251 million years ago, believed to be the most cataclysmic event in the earth's history, wiped out 95 percent living things in the ocean and most species on land. Scientists now think this extraordinary mass extinction may have been quickly followed by an explosion of complexity in marine life and a dramatic shift to complex interrelated ecosystems..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Avoid Infectious Fashion

Decorated designer scrubs maybe in vogue among health care fashionistas, but infection control experts say no hospital garb should be worn outside of work. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Symbolic Dancing of Bees

It's not only humans who derive symbolic meaning from dance. Honeybees use dance to tell each other about flowers and nectar and the best places to find them..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Networks, Technology & Trust

The 80 million member networking website MySpace, instant messaging, e-mail and creations of computing that include YouTube signify an increasingly networked world in which friends and strangers have disembodied social encounters in public. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Bacterial Conversations

Scientists used to think that bacterial cells led tedious lives devoted only to reproducing themselves. Microbiologist Bonnie Bassler changed all that with new discoveries about how bacteria communicate. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Mirror Neurons

Neuroscientists are discovering the biological basis of how exquisitely connected we humans all are to each other. If you wince when you see someone in pain, yawn when your companion yawns, or smile in response to a smile, your mirror neurons are working. Some scientists believe mirror neurons will prove as important to psychology as DNA has been to biology. David Dobbs, in an article A Revealing Reflection, that appeared in the April/May issue of the Scientific American Mind, suggests mirror neurons may be nothing less than a prime driver of human progress.
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Thursday Complexity Post - The Mysterious Monarch

Few living creatures can match the extraordinary flight and navigational abilities of the Monarch butterfly. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Clean Hands

The 17th Century metaphysical poet might not have been at all surprised that modern 21st Century science so firmly endorses his perception. Viewed under a microscope, Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus on human skin is an alarming sight. And it is only one of many visually ugly and potentially deadly microbes that we all carry on our unwashed hands. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Creataceous Pines Grown in Pots

The Greater Blue Mountain Area of Australia is a vast expanse of wilderness famous as a home to unique and ancient plants and animals. But scientists still were amazed by the discovery in 1994 of a tree thought to be extinct for millions of years. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Network Analysis Finds Hidden Patterns

Soccer has no time-outs so quick and smart responses to the dynamics on the field are more important during a game than coaching from the sidelines. So when the University of Maryland Terrapins slumped to lackluster performance after six years of tournament showings, Coach Sasho Cirovski began looking beyond athletic prowess and traditional instruction. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - The Latino Paradox

Medical practitioners have noticed for decades that Latino patients are often healthier than Caucasian and African-American patients with similar education and incomes. The phenomenon is called the Latino Paradox, and it defies the well-documented connection between poverty and poor health. Researchers are trying to learn what the Latino population is doing right, and attention is focusing increasingly on such factors as diet, belief systems and strong social support networks. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Strong Networks Foster Health

For decades, medical practitioners have noted that impoverished Latino patients are often healthier than Caucasian and African-American patients with similar incomes and education. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Coffee Brews Regeneration in Rwanda

From its legendary origins in Sub Saharan Africa to its vital role in the evolution of community and commerce in Europe and America, coffee consumption has accompanied dramatic social change. Now coffee cultivation is bringing new hope and reconciliation to war-ravaged Rwanda..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Finely Crafted Discourse

In an ancient culture where poetry is revered and people have resisted centuries of oppression, artfully selected words and phrases come with invisible webs of mysteriously moored strings. An August 6 New York Times story by Michael Slackman describes the Iranian social principle of taarof, a complex interactive ritual of manners, pretense, and polite expectations. Americans accustomed to short declarative sentences and no frill facts might consider it lying. But taarof is a time-honored element of Iranian communication that linguists and diplomats say Americans need to learn. The persianmirror.com, a site devoted to Persian culture and community explains, "Taarof has deep roots in the Iranian tradition of treating your guests better than your own family, and being gracious hosts. Taarof is a verbal dance between an offerer and an acceptor until one of them agrees. It is a cultural phenomenon that consists of refusing something even though you might want it, out of politeness. On the giving end, it is offering something...to be polite…but not really wanting to give it away.".
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Thursday Complexity Post - Taarof, the fine art of social subterfuge

Thursday Complexity Post - Baby Boomers Face Unprecedented Uncertainty

The 77 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 face risks and uncertainties tht never confronted earlier generations. Americans save less, live longer, and are more likely to outlive their material resources..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Positive Deviance Aids Battle Against Microbes

Jerry Sternin explained the concept of Positive Deviance to audiences at the Said Business School in Oxford, England, recently, and his message may have had special resonance with people who worry about burgeoning infections rates in British hospitals. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Knowledge in One Field Leads to Innovation in Others: Engineering know-how improved audio equipment, physics of sound led to a better car

Amar Bose is founder of the Bose Corporation, known for its high quality audio equipment. Once a professor who taught network theory at MIT, he applied engineering knowledge to the improvement of sound equipment and the physics of sound to a better car ride. In each case knowledge from one field led to unprecedented innovation in another. Business theorists call that knowledge bridging. A study by Wharton Management Professor David Hsu and Kwanghui Lim, a professor at the National University of Singapore, suggests knowledge bridging can help companies make better products faster and earn more money in the process. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Your Computer Can Serve Science While You Sleep-Distributed Computing Brings Dramatic Research Results

Hundreds of thousands a of people all over the world are donating spare computer time for massive research in such areas as climate change, investigations of the origins of life and a search for the gravitational waves that Albert Einstein predicted would ripple through the cosmos distorting time and space.The process is called distributed computing. Scientists take a large research problem and break it down into small components. The smaller projects are then distributed to computers belonging to individuals and businesses that have volunteered their machines for computational time. This resource allows researchers to work through daunting amounts of data faster than ever before. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Skill, Chance and Success: Baseball Knowledge Plays Well in Other Fields

Wade Boggs, a former major league third baseman who won five batting titles was nicknamed "Chicken Man" because he ate chicken before every game. Famed Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto kept a wad of gum on the top of his hat. Slugging centerfielder Ken Griffey Jr. got rid of a Mercedes because he failed to get hits whenever he drove it to games. Pitcher Turk Wendell chewed licorice and brushed his teeth between innings..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Neuroplasticity and Management

Explorations of the endlessly complex interacting networks and chemicals inside the mysterious gelatinous gray material between our ears suggest tantalizing clues to help managers do their jobs better. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Expanding Chinese Desert

More than a quarter of China's land area is covered with desert, and sands are steadily encroaching on village and cities, threatening crop production, transportation and human health and forcing thousands of people to flee their homes..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Dolphins Mysterious Consciousness in the Deep

"When you tell a story about a dolphin" Hardy Jones says, "you are really telling a story about the whole ocean.".
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Thursday Complexity Post - Jane Jacobs, Champion of Cities

New ideas, Jane Jacobs wrote, must use old buildings. It's not just a matter of keeping grace and charm of earlier times. She explained that thriving cities need buildings of varying age and condition, including some rundown structures that can nurture the enterprise of entrepreneurs and innovators unable to afford the expense of new construction gleaming with modern amenities..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Relentless stress breeds chronic illnesses among Katrina evacuees

A new public health study shows 34 percent of children displaced by Hurricane Katrina suffer from such conditions as asthma, anxeity and behavior problems. Adults fared no better. Nearly half of their parents and guardians reported chronic illnesses, and 37 percent said their own health was poor. More than half of the mothers and female guardians scored "very low" on a mental health screening exam. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Mayor fights urban ills creatively

When Antanas Mockus was first elected mayor of Bogota in 1995, traffic in the streets of Colombia's capital city was chaotic, lawless and lethal. So Mockus had 1,500 stars painted on the spots where pedestrians had been killed. Then he hired 420 mimes to direct the flow and make fun of the reckless and heedless..
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Thursday Complexity Post - When Eric Grohe Paints Murals

When artist Eric Grohe looks at a blotched concrete wall beside an unkempt gravel parking lot, he doesn't see urban decay. He sees an opportunity to archive a community's collective memory and enliven its future promise. Grohe creates larger-than-life murals that celebrate the history, the heroes, the joys, sorrows and daily routines of people and places. His art starts with stories. He researches all sorts of public records and "interviews everyone in sight." And all those human dramas become part of the images that can transform a community. In Bucyrus Ohio, for example, Grohe turned an ugly wall into a dramatic entrance to the city and a parking lot became a welcoming space for public and private gatherings. The current issue of emerging, the newsletter of the Plexus Institute, tells how Grohe does his work, and what inspires his art..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Hybrid cars

Some 800 million automobiles are in active use around the world today, and auto industry experts predict that number will grow to 3.25 billion by 2045 as India and China become more industrialized. That's an enormous opportunity for automakers and a breathtaking threat to the environment. Some industry executives are trying to mass market cleaner, less gas-hungry vehicles, and Toyota executives would like to make the internal combustion engine obsolete. Individual decisions and public policies can help promote the success of more environmentally friendly vehicles. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - The Spazdaq or the Bow Jones? Genius will Emerge. Rite-Solutions CEO James R. Lavoie wants employees to play games at work.

CEO James R.Lavoie wants employees at Rite-Solutions, an information technology firm, to invest fantasy money in the Mutual Fun. It's an intellectual opinion game designed to tap the collective mind and find creative ideas in unexpected places. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Self-serve auto salvage: It's not your father's junkyard

California's new campaign to get pollution-belching junkers off the road is adding to a growing busines: auto salvage yards where customers who bring their own tools pay a small fee to pry usable parts from wrecked and ruined vehicles. Californians who turn in their high-emission jalopies get $1,000..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Uncertainty and Doubt Rougher than Risk

Two leading business authorities say today's managers have a tougher time with the amorphous woes of uncertainty and doubt than their earlier counterparts had as they spent their careers facing risk. Nitin Nohria, a professor at the Harvard Business School, and Thomas Stgewart, editor of the Harvard Business Review, discuss uncertainty and doubt in a provocative piece in the HBR. It is one of 20 essays in the HBR List of Breakthrough Ideas for 2006. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Art Anticipates Science and a Physicist Tells Why

Jackson Pollock, the abstract expressionist known for his collossal canvasas richly layered with swirls and streaks of pattern and color, was creating fractals long bedfore anyone knew the term. Physicist Richard P. Taylor, who is also an artist, has spent years analyzing Pollock's work and concluded Pollock's dynamic painting process was similar to the way patterns in nature evcolve..
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Thursday Complexity Post - New Nanotechnology Food Research - If It Glows Don't Eat It

Scientists using nanotechnology and bioluminescence have come up with a spray that can instantly identify a wide range of pathogens in food and drink. The detection system makes use of a luminescent protein molecule that has been modified so it attaches itself to targeted bacterium. If the sprayed food contains any of several pathogens such as Salmonella or e-coli, it will glow..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Global Warming May Be Killing Frogs

Nearly a third of the world's known species of amphibians are threatened with extinction, and at least 112 species have disappeared since 1980. Scientists think global warming, which has fostered the growth of a fungas fatal to frogs, may be to blame. The findings also raise new about how wawrming may change the dynamics of disease. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Good Vibrations Keep Us Balanced

We spend considerable effort and money to muffle and minimize sounds in our noisy world. Dr. James J. Collins, professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, has found ways to take advantage of it. His research shows the same principle-stochastic resonance--is at work in climate change, the ability of marine creatures to catch their prey, and the ability of people to keep their balance. The practical application is that vibrating innersoles help the old and ill keep their balance, preventing dangerous falls. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Warmer Seas and Wilder Storms

Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist Kerry Emanual has discovered statistical evidence that the intensity of hurricanes is related to ocean surface termperature. Years ago he predicted a one degree C increase in tropical ocean temperature would produce a 5 percent increase in wind speed during hurricanes. In fact,warming one half a degree C has brought a 10 percent increase in wind speed..
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Thursday Complexity Post - The Odd and Majestic Wondrously Interwoven in Tapestry of Life

Theologians celebrate the "will to wonder" and evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson finds wonder in the diverse, fascinating and strange organisms that makeup the tapestry of live. She tells of the Elysia Chlorotica, an animal that looks and acts like a leaf, and a wasp that lays its eggs inside the body of a caterpillar. She marvels at patterns that give predictability to divergent facts, and is delighted to be a product of evolution, the same proces that gave us dynasaurs, bread molds and exotic animals. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Schrodinger's Cat

"Cat state" to a physicist means being in two diametrically opposed conditions at once--up and down, here and there, or black and white. The famed Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger probed this puzzle 70 years ago with a mental model of a cat that was, in theory, simultaneously dead and alive. The recent feat of scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Bolder, Colorado, who put some beryllium atoms in a state where they were spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time, has inspired scientists to explore newer experiments that illustrate the exploits of "quantum trickery," and to try and figure out what they mean for the future of quantum mechanics. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Wassail! And Holiday Cheer

Wassailing, a Medieval version of networking, involved groups of people sharing holiday good will and huge vessels of fermented drink. The custom evolved from post-Christmas festivals in early rural England to encourage a good apple crop to Christmas carroling in the 17th Century. Holiday food has evolved, too. Humble Pie is something we eat today, figuratively, when we're embarrassed. You might not want to know what was in the real meal, which was served as a treat for servants and peasants. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Life at the edge of the sea

The Venetians built an empire based on centuries of reconciliation with the sea, allowing the Adriatic to overfill the elaborate network of canals and periodically wash through the city. The Dutch have spent centuries resisting the sea with ingenious systems of seawalls, dikes, reinforced dunes and drainage canals. Today, both these urban lowlands face increasing challenges from rising sea levels, sinking land and more violent storms. The concepts of resistance and reconciliation still inform the engineers and planners trying to tame the impact of sea's inevitable encroachment. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - What is a Stakeholder?

Deputy US Secretary of State Robert Zoellick set off an international scramble among linguists and diplomats when he urged China to become a "responsible stakeholder" in the world ecnomic community. What is a stakeholder? The Chinese language has no real equivalent for the English word. The US State Department suggested a Chinese phrase meaning "participants with related interests." Chinese scholars came up with an assortment of possibilities, including "participants with related benefits and drawbacks." Whatever the fine points, the Chinese Ambassador to the US Zhou Wenzhong decided the meaning should be positive. Asked how the US sees China, he replied, "We are a stakeholder." .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Ancient Ice Holds Past and Future Secrets

Ancient ice drilled from the Antarctic ice sheet may hold secrets about the atmosphere in ages past and offer some clues about the future. Researchers who analyzed tiny air bubbles compressed in the ice have been able to determine that the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are higher now than they have been at any time in the last 650,000 years. Concentrations of carbon dioxide have risen 200 times faster in the last 50 years than at any time in the known history of climate. The rtise in methane concentrations has also been dramatic. The ice studies show that while climate has fluctuated in the past, human activity and the burning of fossil fuels has accelerated the concentration of greenhouse gases far more than any changes that resulted from natural climate cycles. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Pixel Power

Alex Tew is a 21-year-old college student who found an innovative way to earn money for his education. He created www.milliondollarhomepage.com, divided the screen into 10,000 small squares of 100 pixels each, and is selling the pixels for $1 each, with a minimum order of 100.Buyers can put their logos or advertising messages in the space they buy and visitors to the page can link to those websites. Pixels are tiny dots of light and color that are the smallest units in a visual image on the computer screen. Tew has already made more than $600,000 and started a trend that has surprised skeptical advertising executives. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Synchrony Prevails

Mathematician Steven Strogatz calls synchronization "one of the most pervasive drives in the universe." It extends from the subatomic to he cosmic, and impels animate and inanimate systems. That's why bridges, fireflies, humans hearts and human feet have more in common than might be apparent at first glance. The Millennium Bridge, an elegant walkway over the Thames River connecting two parts of London, is a surprising case in point. An alarming wobble began when pedestrians, resonating with subtle movements of the bridge, synchronized their steps and inadvertently amplified the bridge's swaying. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - What You See Isn't Always What You Just Saw

What you see isn't always what you saw. The ambiguous and illusive Necker Cube, discovered nearly 175 years ago by a Swiss crystallographer named Albert Louis Necker, shows how our brains can suddenly switch viewpoints so that images seem to jump back and forth. And that's just one example of the optical illusions that challenge our ability to see, interpret and comprehend..
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Thursday Complexity Post - The legacy of Rosa Parks

By refusing to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama city bus to a white man in 1955, Rosa Parks launched a civil rights awareness that would change America's conscience. Her single act had consequences that cascaded far beyond the time and place in which it happened. It was a simple act that was anything but simple for Mrs. Parks. It was difficult and dangerous for her, and the culmination of successive iterations of ideals she had pursued for years as she worked for voter registration, school desegregation, youth education, and the programs of her church and community. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - From Peanuts to Petroleum and Back

When Rudolph Diesel invented the diesel engine in 1900, he designed it to run on peanut oil. By the time he died in 1913, an emerging petroleum industry was changing the direction of engines and fuels. Faced with today's rising oil prices and environmental concerns, a growing number of motorists are retrofitting their modern diesel powered cars to run on vegetable oil. "Greasecar" enthusiasts insist they don't mind riding around in vehicles that smell like onion rings and French fries. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Ripe Oaths May Illuminate Brain Architecture

When people let loose with the obscene, the profane and the venomously insulting, the "executive center" of the brain is ablaze with neural activity, scientists say. Dr. David Silbersweig, director of neuropsychiatry and neuroimaging at the Weil Medical College of Cornell University and colleagues measured cerebral blood flow of Tourette's patients when they were experiencing episodes of coprolalia, the pathological and uncontrollable urge to curse. Their findings, which produce new insight into how different domains of the brain communicate, are described in a New York Times story by Natalie Angier. Read about other researchers, including psychology professor Timothy B. Jay, author of Cursing in America, and Geoffrey Hughes, author of Swearing, who studied the subject of cussing from social, cultural and philosophical viewpoints..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Where Chaos Means Order and Fractals Aren't Mean

Conversationally, chaos implies disorder and randomness. In science, chaos means a highly ordered system of nonlinear mathematical equations. In this sense, chaos is the opposite of disorder, and has no element of chance. Larry Liebovitch, interim director at the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University, makes advanced mathematically based concepts accessible in his book, Fractals and Chaos Simplified for Life Sciences, in articles, and in new tutorials about chaos, fractals and scaling that are available on Society for Chaos Theory website..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Malcolm Gladwell on 'Moral Hazard'

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best selling books Blink and The Tipping Point, writes about the findings of two Harvard researchers, medical anthropologist Susan Starr Sered and physician and Plexus member Rushika Fernandopulle, who interviewed 120 Americans who lack access to medical care. Their book. Uninsured in America: Life and Death in the Land of Opportunity, chronicles the hidden costs of being without medical insurance-the cascading social, economic and human devastation that accumulates when untreated illnesses get worse. Gladwell looks at their findings and analyses the concept of "moral hazard", an idea he says has dominated the economists who influence American health care..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Home on the Range, Pleistocene Stylens

Human population is declining in some parts of the Great Plains of the US, and that may create opportunities for revitalizing the land, a group of prominent scientists believes. A dozen conservationists and ecologists from 10 universities and institution have proposed a plan to introduce lions, camels, cheetahs, wild horses and elephants to the area in phases and under controlled circumstances. Ancestors of these creatures inhabited these lands in Pleistocene times, these scientists say, and their depletion by eons of human hunters has been ecologically detrimental. In the absence of large predators that stomp the ground and keep small animals on the run, pesky weeds and vermin tend to take over the landscape. Other experiments have shown dangerous animals can coexist with humans, the scientists say. And as Josh Donlon, a Cornell graduate student and lead author of the paper asserts, "re-wilding" is preferable to a future of rats and dandelions.
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Thursday Complexity Post - What Will Happen If the Web Starts to Think

Kevin Kelly, the editor at large of Wired Magazine, the author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Economic and Social Systems, thinks that historians 1,000 years from now will look back at our time as a pivotal era, a time when a major change took place in civilization. Already, Kelly writes in Wired Magazine, we are seeing powerful social changes growing from masses of interconnected humans interacting in unpredictable ways. Kelly envisions the Web as a giant operating system for a planet-sized computer, and he points out that some computer geniuses think the first real artificial intelligence will emerge from the Web. The massive computer the Web operates already has electronic complexity rivaling the human brain, and unlike the brain, it is every-expanding and doubling its capacity every few years. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Richard Feynman's Art Advanced Physics

The renowned quantum physicist Richard P. Feynman, the late Nobel laureate who mentored many young theoreticians, advanced knowledge in his field through art as well as physics and mathematics. His ability to create simple diagrams representing the actions and interactions of subatomic particles gave physicists a new tool that helped them streamline unmanageable algebraic calculations and think about research problems in a new way. His visualized ideas are explained and celebrated in Drawing Physics Apart, a new book by David Kaiser, a physicist and historian at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They are also commemorated and depicted on a US postage stamp honoring American scientists. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Oceans Hold Clues to Our Past, Lessons for Our Future

Modern understandings of some of amazing marine creatures shed light on the intricate interrelationships of organisms that life in the sea. The Portuguese Man of War, for instance, a gelatinous cousin of the jellyfish, isn't one creature. It is a floating colony of individual organisms fulfilling separate tasks that create a community-a community that functions as a unit. Dr. Ellen Prager, a marine scientist and experienced diver, describes extraordinary creatures and other wonders and mysteries in her new book The Oceans. Her comprehensive exploration of the ocean, from its beginnings billions of years ago to its present-day vital importance to human life on the planet, take the reader on a whirlwind voyage through history, geology chemistry, biology, and some modern-day practices that imperil the health and bounty of the sea. The author's sense of infinite time, space and the majesty of continual change and adaptation infuse her fact-filled pages with a feeling of awe wonder..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Piecemeal Solutions or Collective Commitment

African leaders see science, technology and education as key element in the fight against devastating African poverty. They also think solutions need to factor in the needs of local communities and environments, and that a strengthened educational system is crucial to train the scientists and engineers to confront the challenges of disease, hunger, soil depletion, contaminated water and ecological damage. While economists agree on the tragic consequences of African poverty, views differ on how to alleviate it. Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time, calls for collective commitment and a global network of cooperation. William Easterly, author of The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics, advocates piecemeal solutions with measurable accountability and local feedback..
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Thursday Complexity Post - The Things We Feel May Not Be Real

Can trust be artificially induced? Swiss and Americans scientists think it can. A team of researchers led by Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich investigated whether oxytocin, a chemically produced naturally in the brain, can influence behavior when externally administered. In an experimental money game, volunteers who inhaled a nasal spray containing a synthetic form of oxytocin trusted a banker to take control their money far more often than volunteers who breathed in a placebo. Forty-five percent of the chemically-influenced volunteer investors parted with all of their cash, compared with only 21 per cent of the investors in the placebo group. These findings may be helpful in treating mental disorders, and there is potential for abuse. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Connections Vital in Societies, Hearts and Brains

Scientists studying the networked configuration of synapses in the human brain are generating a new perspective that is informing social scientists in their views about the present structure of society and the potential for future changes. Multitude, a new book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, is reviewed by Plexus member Carver Tate. Researchers at Johns Hopkins recently studied patients with no history of coronary or coronary artery disease who suffered heart failure after sudden, severe emotional stress. Plexus Science Advisors Pat Rush and Bob Lindberg, both physicians who have woven complexity into their clinical practices, take a look at what that means for doctors, patients and all of us. Read these stories and more in the April/May issue of the Plexus Institute newsletter emerging. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - "Jazz" in Chinese Economy

The burgeoning Chinese economy, its exponential growth, and its unexpected developments, are analyzed by scholars and business leaders in a conference sponsored by the Wharton China Business Forum of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. These experts say the Chinese economy operates 'liker a jazz combo', with furious improvising, swirling sound and disorienting rhythm. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Bacteria that resists antibiotics

More than 70 per cent of all healthcare-related infections are caused by bacteria that have become resistant to one or more previously effective antibiotics. Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA is one of the fastest growing known pathogens. The US has the world's second highest rate of MRSA infections, which are serious for medically vulnerable people and which have twice the mortality of infections that can be treated with methicillin. Dr. Jon Lloyd, Pittsburgh MRSA Prevention Coordinator, VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, describes how positive deviance may help combat this formidable microbial adversary. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - A Paradox: Communication is the Issue and the Answer

Dr. Anthony Cusano, an attending physician at the department of nephrology at Waterbury Hospital in Waterbury, CT, became fascinated with the concept of Positive Deviance after Jerry and Monique Sternin, PD pioneers, conducted grand rounds at the hopsital. Dr. Cusano decided to apply it to the intractable problem of medical reconciliation. Dr. Cusano, who is also an assistant clinical professor at Yale University School of Medicine, had worked on reconciliation issues for years as a member of the hospital’s pharmacy and therapeutics committee. A survey of patients recently discharged from Waterbury showed 60 percent were not taking medications properly. A PD approach changed that..
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Thursday Complexity Post - Positive Deviants

How do you bridge the gap between what is and what could be? Jerry Sternin, who pioneered social applications of Positive Deviance, describes some creative pathways to that bridge in "Your Company's Secret Change Agent," a Harvard Busiess Review article he wrote with consultant and author Richard Tanner Pascale. Are some people in the organization doing things differently and better? Learn from them. When managers try to impose change designed by outside experts, they are apt to face resistance and rejection. When indigenous successes of "positive deviants" are brought into the mainstream, helpful changes are enthusiastically embraced. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Uninsured in America

Obesity and rotten teeth identify a growing number of Americans with membership in an emerging social caste of the ill, infirm and and marginally employed, authors of a new book believe. Uninsured in America: Life and Death in the Land of Opportunity, by Susan Sered and Plexus member Rushika Fernandopulle, tells how untreated medical problems escalate into adversities that cascade through all areas of life and across generations. America is undergoing a fundamental shift from class to caste, the authors say, and our new "untouchables" are the uninsured who are fated to become and remain sick. Further, they warn, because health insurance is linked to employment, only the very rich are immune from a poential slide into the new low caste. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Physicist John Wheeler

John Wheeler, viewed by many scholars as one of America's most innovative physicists, used his understanding of Einstein's theories of relativity and quantum mechanics to predict the existence of "space-time foam". He also coined the phrase "black hole" to discuss what happens when a star collapses, and to describe a region of space-time from which nothing, not even light, can escape. Science and the Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology and Complexity, a new book edited by John D. Barrow and others, is reviewed in Nature, and Wheeler's own words are captured in a 2003 radio interview with Paul Davies, a physicist and author who wrote the first chapter of the book. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Wikipedia

Four years ago a wealthy options trader named Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales decided to create a massive, free, on-line, community-built encyclopedia with an unprecedented assortment of knowledge that would be available to every person on the planet. An army of dedicated volunteers has created just that--a collection of some 1.3 million articles in ten languages at www.wikipedia.org It's a collaborative, self-organizing revolution in research. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Health Leadership

Graduate education for health care leaders needs to focus on the complex nature of health care organizations, two leading scholars say. Dr. Henry Mintzberg, an internationally known management scholar, and Dr. Sholom Glouberman, a philosopher who has worked in health care policy and research in Canada and the United Kingdom, will lead the International Program in Health Leadership, which will be offered by the faculties of medicine and management at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. The program, which starts in November 2005, is designed to give 40 students from all over the world deep understanding of the complex field of health along with a sophisticated knowledge of the art of management. Students will learn skills to make the best of existing conditions as well as to effect change in face of challenging economic, social an political realities. .
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Thursday Complexity Post - Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology, the use of tiny particles equivalent in size to one millionth of a millimeter, is the stuff of futuristic fiction and an emerging science expected to have profound impact in medicine, communications, the military and consumer products. It is surprising to learn that the medieval artisans who put minute quantities of gold and silver in molten glass to create the luminous colors that still glow from the windows of Europe's cathedrals may have been the earliest, if inadvertant, nanotechnologists. .
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