Over the past decades, the cultural evolution field has generated an important body of knowledge using experimental, historical, and computational methods. While these approaches have generated testable hypotheses, many phenomena are too complex for agent-based models. Here we propose that an employ of Large Language Models (LLMs) can be a novel way to represent human behavior. We simulate cultural evolution in populations of LLMs by variables such as network structure, personality, and social information. The software for conducting these simulations is open-source and features a user-interface to build bridges between the fields of cultural evolution and generative artificial intelligence.

The Flowers project-team, at the University of Bordeaux and at Ensta ParisTech, studies versions of hoistic individual development. These models can help us better understand how children learn, as well as to build machines that gain knowledge as children do, aka developmental artificial intelligence, with applications in educational technologies, automated discovery, robotics and human-computer interaction.

Earth Earns: An Open Participatory Earthropocene to Astropocene CoCreative Future

Overbye, Dennis. The Doomsday Clock Keeps Ticking. New York Times. FebruarY 12, 2024. (Are humans the only beings in the universe confronting global self-destruction? Or just the last ones standing?) As if on cue, the veteran science writer notes that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists journal has moved their Doomsday Clock closer than ever at 1.5 minutes, 90 seconds, from midnight because of internecine wars, barbaric warlords, nuclear threats, climate extremes, the list goes on. Overbye scans present opinion upon the possibility of ET civilizations which lately tends to their absence as life struggles to get beyond microbial stages. JWST images at the edges of space and time add more evidence. He then invokes the Great Filter icon of some ultimate event that all techno-civilizations have to safely pass through to survive. See also Observational Constraints on the Great Filter at arXiv:2002.08776.

Yet there is no evidence that Earth has been visited, or even by an interstellar radio signal — the Great Silence, radio astronomers call it. One answer is that other civilizations are too sparse in space and time. Or we truly are alone, despite images from the James Webb Space Telescope of galaxies scattered like sand in the winds of time. Life arose on Earth within half a billion years of its formation, which suggests that generating at least a microbial form is easy. Maybe intelligence is the hard part.

Chiesa, Luisa. Guest Editorial.. IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity. 34/2, 2024. A Tufts University mechanical engineering professor introduces this progress report for the latest achievements of this American fusion energy endeavor. See also the www.iter.org website all about the major European project.

This Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity is a collection of six papers focusing on the SPARC Toroidal Field Model Coil Program (TFMC), a collaboration between the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a company with the objective of developing fusion as an energy source. This three-year effort between 2018 and 2021 had the goal of designing, building, and testing a first-in-class, superconducting toroidal field coil made with the high-temperature Rare Earth Barium Copper Oxide. The TFMC was a prototype now being integrated into the toroidal field magnet of the SPARC tokamak, a net-energy magnetic fusion device currently under construction.

ITER ("The Way" in Latin) is one of the most ambitious energy projects in the world today. In southern France, 35 nations are collaborating to build the world's largest tokamak, a magnetic fusion device that has been designed to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy based on the same principle that powers our Sun and stars.

Gianfrate, Antonio, et al. Reconfigurable quantum fluid molecules of bound states in the continuum. Nature Physics. 20/1, 2024. We enter this work by thirteen nanoscientists mainly at CNR Nanotechnology, Italy and Princeton University as another instance of mid 2020s Earthuman abilities to learn all about and delve into any depth of as an evolitionary project to begin an new intentional quantum phase cocreation.

Topological bound states are confined wave-mechanical objects that offer advantageous ways to enhance light–matter interactions in photonic devices. Here we show that polariton condensation into a negative-mass bound state in the continuum exhibits interactive confinement to attain optically reprogrammable molecular arrays of quantum fluids of light. We demonstrate the scalability of our technique by extended mono- and diatomic chains of bound-state-in-the-continuum polariton fluids. (Excerpt)

Mitra, Anupam, et al.. Macrostates vs. Microstates in the Classical Simulation of Critical Phenomena in Quench Dynamics of 1D Ising Models. arXiv:2310.08567.. This entry by Center for Quantum Information and Control, University of New Mexico physicists including Ivan Deutsch is posted as an example among many to show how readily human intellects can delve into these fundamental depths and then to take over and commence anew a second intentional, informed material cocreation. See also Ultracold field-linked tetratomic molecules by Chen, Xing-Yan Chen, et al in Nature (January 31, 2024) for a similar instance.

We study the tractability of classically simulating critical phenomena in the quench dynamics of one-dimensional transverse field Ising models (TFIMs) using highly truncated matrix product states (MPS). We focus on two paradigmatic examples: a dynamical quantum phase transition (DQPT) that occurs in nonintegrable long-range TFIMs, and the infinite-time correlation length of the integrable nearest-neighbor TFIM when quenched to the critical point. For the DQPT, we show that the order parameters can be efficiently simulated with surprisingly heavy truncation of the MPS bond dimension. This can be used to reliably extract critical properties of the phase transition, including critical exponents, even when the full many-body state is not simulated with high fidelity.

Velasco-Garcia, Laura and Carla Casadevall. Bioinspired photocatalytic systems towards compartmentalized artificial photosynthesis. Communications Chemistry. 6/263, 2023. Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ), Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology describe initial proof of principle verifications that these nature-based approaches can facilitate viable ways to achieve this vital biological process going forward.

Artificial photosynthesis aims to produce fuels and chemicals from simpler versions using sunlight as an energy source. To achieve novel photocatalysis, this review turns to bioinspired artificial vesicles as a source. We discuss recent examples such as light harvesting, charge transfer, and fuel production. These studies cite the pivotal role of the membrane to increase the stability of reaction partners, a suitable local environment, and force proximity between electron donor and acceptor molecules. Overall, these findings pave the way for further bioinspired artificial photosynthesis projects. (Excerpt)

Wytock, Thomas and Adison Motter. Cell reprogramming design by transfer learning of functional transcriptional networks. PNAS. 121/11, 2024. Northwestern University biophysicists (search AM) advance the latest mathematical insights into 3D genomics so to achieve better malady management and medicines.

The lack of genome-wide models for gene regulatory networks complicates the application of control theory to cell behavior. We address this by a transfer learning approach that leverages genome-wide transcriptomic profiles to characterize cell type attractors responses. These responses predict a combinatorial perturbation that minimizes the transcriptional difference between an initial and target cell type, bringing the regulatory network to the basin of attraction. This approach will enable the rapid identification of treatments for complex diseases, and how the dynamics of gene regulatory networks affect phenotypes. (Significance)

McManus, Matthew. Liberal Socialism Now. Aeon Magazine. February, 2024. A University of Michigan political scientist posts a popular review of his thought and writings which have come to advocate an egalitarian reciprocity of personal and communal welfare. He notes how these polar options which have jostled each other through history are often misunderstood and ill defined. In our hyper-stressed moment it is imperative that an obvious middle way complementarity be considered.

The idea of ‘liberal socialism’ might appear odd and opposite. This would be true for those on the Right and the Left who regard liberalism as market capitalism. We must now make an effort to retrieve its historic theory and make the case for a new salience in the 21st century (see also my forthcoming book The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism). The composite phrase is a political ideology that combines support for many liberal institutions and rights with a socialist desire to establish far more equitable and democratic economic arrangements.

Nevertheless, all liberal socialists are committed to three central principles. First, they value (both) collectivism and normative individualism and believe that the wellbeing and free development of individual persons is a moral priority along with their embeddedness in society. Secondly, liberal socialists are committed to each person having an equal opportunity to lead a good life through the provision of shared resources. Third, they are committed to a basic social structure by participatory democratic policies and principles for family and the economy.

Mulya, Didi Ahmad and Romi Muslim. Phase transition and universality of the majority-rule model on complex networks. arXiv:2402.13434. In a paper to appear in the International Journal of Modern Physics C, National Research and Innovation Agency, Indonesia, and University of Technology, Yogyakarta, Indonesia consider possible ways that bipolar political elections might be based in and attributed to basic statistical physics phenomena.

We investigate the phenomena of order-disorder phase transition and the universality of the majority rule model defined on three complex networks, namely the Barabasi-Albert, Watts-Strogatz, and Erdos-Renyi versions. Assume each agent holds two possible opinions distribute across the nodes. Based on our scaling analysis, it is found that the model undergoes a continuous phase transition, with critical points for independence model greater than the anticonformity model. We obtain critical exponents indicating that they exhibit the same universality class as the mean-field Ising model. (Abstract)

We conducted an analysis of the order-disorder phase transition and the universality class of the majority-rule model implemented on heterogeneous networks, wherein each node maintains connections to at least two other nodes. Each agent has two possible opinions across all network nodes. Each agent adheres to the principle of conformity by behavior aligned with the majority opinion. Notably, agents also exhibit anticonformity and independence proclivities. Within this model, anticonformist agents adopt the minority opinion, adjusting their opinion or state to align with the minority viewpoint, while independent agents act autonomously, unaffected by the influence of other agents. (5)

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