We're starting a series of articles about network science. There's been a lot in the news this past several months, and so there's a handful more of these posts to come. As expected, some of this comes from Northeastern, home of the Barabasi Labs that brought us network science proper, at the same time actual social networks were forming, not yet Facebook, but more like Napster, etc., circa 2001. Then there's the Santa Fe Institute and the Vienna Complexity Hub, both institutions focusing on complexity theory, which often includes network science.
If you want to know how ideas spread, or how to control an entire population in six easy steps, this is where you start. Just remember, we don't really have fake people yet, but we're almost there. And when we do, all this science will be used, by them, against us.
Mapping out the hidden mechanics behind why some fads spread like wildfire
Nov 2025, phys.org
It's group pair interactions all the way down: As pairs of people meet up, the contagious illness or behavior can spread between them. As these two people then interact in groups, either together or separately, this helps to spread it further. The more groups they are in, the further the infection is likely to travel. They found that the higher the overlap of these groups, the easier it is to start an epidemic.
Just read that paper title.
via Northeastern University Network Science Institute in London: Disentangling the Role of Heterogeneity and Hyperedge Overlap in Explosive Contagion on Higher-Order Networks, Physical Review Letters (2025). DOI: 10.1103/z3d5-94zb
Image credit: Slime mold Cribraria purpurea by Igor Rudkovsky - Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition - 2025
Cuisines can be broken down into simple 'culinary fingerprints,' research finds
Nov 2025, phys.org
This is NOT from the people who brought you the original Food Network, the scientists at Northeastern's Barabasi Labs, but a different group entirely:
The Fingerprints:
- Indian food had the central component of spices in its recipes,
- "New World" countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia are "more homogenized", maybe because of the strong immigration cultural blending
- Scandinavian cuisine shows significantly lower usage of vegetables, herbs, and plants
The Recipe Data:
- 23 cuisines from Thai to Eastern European
- 45,661 recipes made up of 604 ingredients, simplified to 20 network groupings
via Network Science Institute, University of Catania in Italy, Savitribai Phule Pune University in India, Central European University in Austria, CENTAI Institute in Turin and Complexity Science Hub in Austria: Claudio Caprioli et al, The networks of ingredient combinations as culinary fingerprints of world cuisines, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2408.15162
Climate policies can backfire by eroding 'green' values, study finds
Dec 2025, phys.org
Santa Fe Institute does memetics: They surveyed more than 3,000 Germans representative of the country's demographics, asking about climate policies and for comparison COVID-19 policies. Restrictions that promote carbon-neutral behavior, like urban car bans, may trigger strong negative reactions — even among people who would voluntarily choose sustainable lifestyles. They found a 52% greater negative response to climate mandates than to COVID-19 mandates.
^Which is hard to believe considering how unrelentingly pissed off people got about covid restrictions.
"The science and technology to provide a low-carbon way of life is nearly solved. What's lagging behind is a social–behavioral science of effective and politically viable climate policies." Mandate resistance was less for people who felt that policies were effective, didn't restrict their freedom of choice, and were not intrusive on their privacy or their body.
via Santa Fe Institute: Katrin Schmelz et al, An empirically based dynamic approach to sustainable climate policy design, Nature Sustainability (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41893-025-01715-5
*Katrin Schmelz is SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow, behavioral economist and psychologist who also holds an Associate Professorship at the Technical University of Denmark.
People swear on social media more with acquaintances than with friends — analysis can help detect fake profiles
Dec 2025, phys.org
Americans use the f-word more frequently on social media than Australians or Britons, but Australians are more creative in its use. To account for the heterogeneity of social media communication, the study first identified more than 2,300 spelling variants of the f-word in the dataset.The research team analyzed social media updates and Twitter networks from 2006–2023, covering nearly half a million individuals in thousands of social networks, from Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. and including metadata such as location and other contextual information. Then they assessed how closely or loosely connected people were.
Results:
- Tendency to use the f-word clearly increases with acquaintances when compared with close friends
- Swearing was rare in very small social networks of less than 15 people, regardless of how close-knit they were, suggesting that network size is a key determinant of swearing
- But the distinction between friends and acquaintances became irrelevant when the network size reached around 100–120 people; earlier research shows trust is stronger in small networks than in larger ones, with the distinction at roughly one hundred members.
And why is this important you ask?
AI can easily produce text. Instead, researchers should also examine the networks within which language is being used. "These networks are extremely difficult to fake because they create a digital fingerprint for each user. They reflect a user's previous social media behavior, making profiles identifiable." Combining these data with, e.g., swear word usage frequency within a particular network, can help determine whether an account is real or not.
via University of Eastern Finland: Mikko Laitinen et al, Do we swear more with friends or with acquaintances? F#ck in social networks, Lingua (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103931
Scientists use string theory to crack the code of natural networks
Jan 2026, phys.org
Get the heck outta here.
"There seems to be a universal rule governing the formation of biological networks. This optimization rule is purely geometric. It does not care about types of materials or tasks, and it turns out to be quite universal and applicable to many different datasets.""We were treating these structures like wire diagrams. But they're not thin wires, they're three-dimensional physical objects with surfaces that must connect smoothly." It turns out they follow rules borrowed from an unlikely source: string theory.The work represents the first time string theory — a framework developed to unify quantum mechanics and gravity — has successfully described real biological structures.
via Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Albert-László Barabási: Surface optimization governs the local design of physical networks, Nature (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09784-4. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09784-4
https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09784-4
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