oktober 2016

A combination of unprecedented control and manufacturing techniques allows us to structure and create new (meta-)materials over a large range of scales. This development will vastly increase the range of phenomena that we can understand, including known states of matter under new conditions and behavior of molecules over time in a living person. Even the idea of making synthetic cells or designing new, industrially useful forms of living systems is no longer science fiction. Creating this wealth of new materials, devices and living systems is likely to lead to a bigger revolution than the introduction of plastics. The design of…

More and more in the early part of this 21st century we are being made to realize the creative power of complexity dynamics and its potential for system self-organization and emergence. In some arenas such as a multicultural society, the economy, technology, the arts, and even our daily lives, self-organization and emergence is a source of great diversity and creativity; but in other areas such as financial markets, terror networks, and the global climate it can be a source of great instability and destruction. Over the last 400 years cause and effect has told us a lot about the dynamics of…

We live amid a global wave of anthropogenically driven biodiversity loss: species and population extirpations and, critically, declines in local species abundance. Particularly, human impacts on animal biodiversity are an under-recognized form of global environmental change. Arguably the most serious aspect of the environmental crisis is the loss of biodiversity—the other living things with which we share Earth. This affects human well-being by interfering with crucial ecosystem services such as crop pollination and water purification and by destroying humanity’s beautiful, fascinating, and culturally important living companions. Analysis shows that current extinction rates vastly exceed natural average background rates, even when…