Weekend arXiv posts trail weekdays by 12–26% in citations
Six astronomy journals, 37,000 papers: weekday medians are flat, weekend ones lag consistently
· “Which is the best day of the week to submit to arXiv:astro-ph?”
physics.soc-ph
Physics and Society
Structure, dynamics and collective behavior of societies and groups (human or otherwise). Quantitative analysis of social networks and other complex networks. Physics and engineering of infrastructure and systems of broad societal impact (e.g., energy grids, transportation networks).
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Opinions on AI in physics compiled to seed community talks
A discussion summary on how AI is changing research and education offers a prompt for other groups to address local issues.
Controlled approximation solves network master equations analytically
Framework closes moment equations to find steady states for SIS, voter, and evolutionary game models on networks.
· “Analytical Framework for the Approximate Master Equation”
Lockdown data reveal travel power law as mixture illusion
Individual trips are lognormal; pooling across spatial scales fakes a heavy tail.
· “The power law in human mobility is a mixture artifact: evidence from a pandemic natural experiment”
A new framework treats leveraged ETFs on correlated stocks as one coupled feedback system
Market stability of leveraged products should be judged by a matrix measuring coupled feedback across correlated assets, not by each…
The paper simulates Q-learning agents playing prisoner's dilemma on networks and varies…
Q-learning agents in spatial prisoner's dilemma cooperate most when they observe roughly three to four neighbors, a non-monotonic effect…
· “Evolution of cooperation with Q-learning: how much information do we need?”
When AI writes proofs, a human must keep the stop button
LLMs make studio proofs credible; legitimacy lies in who can reconstruct, challenge, and stop the result.
This paper derives a conserved quantity that
For a non-infectious disease, social feedback—not cure rate—sets the long-run treatment mix.
· “Competition between evidence-based and alternative medical paradigms in non-infectious diseases”
Africa's astronomy knowledge is archived abroad
Just 0.36% of African-affiliated astronomy papers appear in Africa-based journals; the rest are validated elsewhere.
· “From Timbuktu to SKA: Who owns the Astronomy knowledge Africa produces?”
Amplitude-jump networks trace the map's skeleton from one orbit
From one 20,000-step trajectory, centrality patterns expose stable and unstable periodic points, supertracks, and crisis boundaries.
· “Identifying the structure of dynamical transitions in logistic map”
Social tipping obeys exact finite-size scaling laws
The minimum activist seed that triggers a full cascade has a calculable window width and fluctuation scale.
· “Exact Scaling Theory of Social Tipping Phenomena in Finite Populations”
Ownership share decides human fate in a machine-run economy
A post-AGI model shows GDP and human welfare decouple; only the share of machines humans own still matters.
Dengue risk in Europe may rise 300-fold by 2100
Warming and air travel shift Europe from imported outbreaks to environment-driven dengue transmission.
· “Climate change and human mobility will shape dengue emergence risk in Europe”
Reputation alone flips the prisoner's dilemma to full cooperation
A trust-weighted blend of own and neighbors' payoffs creates a discontinuous, bistable cooperative phase in a spatial Q-learning model.
· “Emergence of cooperation: A reputation-modulated reinforcement learning”
A like-ranked feed makes LLM agents echo each other's wording
In 448 trials, ranked peer posts raise wording similarity; four sources show no reliable stance edge.
Flexible data centers: value is spatial in PJM
Co-optimizing generation, storage, and transmission finds PJM savings of 6–19% and new solar value in Korea.
· “Shift or curtail? How much data-center flexibility is worth depends on the host power grid”
Three coupled equations now simulate disordered traffic
Longitudinal and lateral accelerations together reproduce shockwaves, sideways spread, and road-edge confinement.
City size does not change per-capita built-up land
Across 1,860 cities, built-up land scales one-for-one with population; wealth explains the rest.
· “Removing Population Size, World Cities Leave on Land a Footprint of Wealth”
Keeping small quakes lifts hybrid model past ETAS and neural baselines
On the 2016–2017 central-Italy sequence, M<3 events in the history sharpen M≥3 timing forecasts.
· “Scaling-law-informed neural point processes for earthquake sequence forecasting”
Simplicial closure fragments explosive cooperation transitions
Closure turns one first-order-like cooperation transition into a spread of metastable states.
Leibniz chokepoint splits 900 years of math lineage
Tracing 64 Fields Medalists back 57 generations, the paper finds 84.4% of lineages converge on five medieval scholars.
Research-access satellites map building heights to 5.34 m
A location-aware forest reads TerraSAR-X, PlanetScope, and Sentinel-1 to predict per-building height where LiDAR is rare.
Messy democracy is rewriting the mathematics of collective choice
Voting, participatory budgeting, and citizens' assemblies now demand data-grounded theory and practical algorithms.
Spectral fingerprint captures street fabric that centrality misses
Mesh Index stays independent of integration (correlation 0.06) and tracks functional diversity at neighbourhood scale.
A field's birth is visible as a drop in its knowledge-map modularity
Across three test areas, the knowledge base's modularity falls as the field forms and can later rebound.
· “Declining Modularity of Intellectual Bases During the Emergence of Research Areas”
On networks, only spatial variance warns before a tipping point
Fluctuations along one critical eigenvector make spatial variance diverge; other standard signals saturate or lose direction.
· “A theory of spatial early warning signals for tipping points on complex networks”
First SEC social disclosure raises firm risk
First-time social news in SEC filings lifts firm-specific risk; repeated disclosure lowers it, a 755-firm study shows.
· “Is the medium the message? Social disclosure channels and firm risk”
Moltbook communities drift from their names as Reddit's stay aligned
Agent-run site turns more uniform and drifts from its names; Reddit keeps internal diversity and sharp separation.
Choosing shared tasks strategically makes collective action bistable
A queueing model yields a closed-form transition: collapse is irreversible without one memory time of persistence.
· “Absorbing phase transition in a queueing model of coupled adaptive agents”
One scalar equation predicts resilience of higher-order networks
Two structural coefficients keep pairwise and triangular couplings separate while matching steady-state branches and transitions.
Roads outlived the Inca Empire
Persistent homology shows the Qhapaq Ñan stayed intact while Inca political control fell to zero by 1537.
Aztec collapse traced to zero-redundancy tribute tree and 22-km void
Zero redundancy in the tribute layer and a 22-km void containing Tlaxcala explain the empire's two-year fall.
Electoral shock response is set by the mobile voter pool
Model says scandals move polarized electorates through undecided voters, not through partisan conversion.
· “Beyond persuasion: Mobile electoral interfaces in polarized societies”
One equation captures tipping points of higher-order network dynamics
Group interactions collapse into one effective coupling that reproduces full-network transitions.
A 0.25 income gap sets the radius of daily mobility in U.S
Daily flows cluster among economically similar neighborhoods, with a universal ceiling on upward mobility.
· “Economic Distance Structures Urban Mobility in 109 U.S. Cities”
Sector conflicts, not internal turmoil, drive market imbalance
S&P 500 signed-network analysis shows crisis-time balance loss comes from conflicts between sectors, not within them
· “Sectoral inter-dependencies drive the loss of structural balance in signed financial networks”
AM radio reached quake-isolated Noto tip via sea paths
Field measurements show overwater AM signals beat nearer land-based stations; FM needed a nearby relay
China can erase 1.2 Gt of coal CO2 per year at negative cost
Retrofit interactions make 1.2 Gt of profitable abatement possible; carbon neutrality costs $56 per tonne.
· “Technology interactions reshape the economics of China's coal power decarbonization”
New coal plants can stay viable past 2040 only with CCUS-ready design
A site-level real-options model maps where CO2 storage and operating subsidies keep coal economics alive.
· “Unlocking CCUS-Ready Coal Power Investments: A Spatial Real Options Approach”
Crypto's statistical maturity is skin-deep
BTC, ETH and XRP match stocks on tails and memory, yet large moves show stronger directional time asymmetry.
· “Universality and Heterogeneity of Stylized Facts in Cryptocurrency and Equity Markets”
Triangle-count index matches top stress detectors
A parameter-free stress measure beats the industry standard and names the culprit asset for free.
New curvature for complex-weighted graphs recovers the directed case
With k-th-root-of-unity phases, it reduces to a layered directed graph and finds communities undirected curvature misses.
Path-length peak precedes collapse at a critical routing horizon
Finite horizons keep path percolation mean-field; at N^(1/3), path lengthening decouples from structural breakdown.
Spotify flags only 1 in 4 sexually explicit reggaeton songs
A calibrated LLM scorer applied to 1,259 songs also finds explicit lyrics doubled from 2002 to 2025 while suggestiveness stayed flat.
· “Towards an LLM-based method for quantifying the sexual content in song lyrics”
Epidemic curves matched by space-time message passing
A ball-by-ball hierarchy treats returning infections exactly to any depth, matching simulation on random and real networks.
Friendship paradox distorts behavior in first causal test
Subjects over-respond to their neighbors' average and keep the bias after moving in the network.
· “The friendship paradox: Causal evidence of its behavioral consequences”
One-way chat drives an AI into alien behavior absent in isolation
Listening, not identity, decides which identical AI changes; who listens governs who leaves its baseline.
· “Interaction Creates Dynamical AI Behavior Absent in Isolation”
Hit all four incentive thresholds or AI misinformation wins
A three-party evolutionary model shows that rewards, punishment, reputation loss, and user value must all cross critical levels.
· “Coordinated incentives in AI-generated misinformation governance”
No hyperbolic embedder wins all tasks
Benchmark of 13 unsupervised methods shows which embedding families to pick for link prediction and topology reconstruction.
· “Hyperbolic Graph Embedders for Link Prediction and Topology Reconstruction”
State description alone flipped whether AI agents synchronized
The same physical state, described differently, picked opposite synchronization outcomes in GPT and Claude.
Agentic AI needs a human mentor for real research work
A Superfund case study shows AI-generated R code only became trustworthy after expert checkpoints caught hidden errors.
· “Agentic Artificial Intelligence for Reproducible Human-in-the-Loop Environmental Health Research”
Corporate AI emissions gain a three-tier accounting method
Spend, token logs, or provider data each yield a defensible GHG figure for AI use.
· “Estimating GHG Emissions from AI Use: Framework for Corporate-Level Measurement”
Subtracting baselines makes tipping warnings reliable
A variance computed against per-node baselines beats long single-node records—and needs only 20% of nodes.
· “Baseline-referenced spatial early warning signals for tipping points on heterogeneous networks”
Epidemic size and threshold fall out of one event graph
A new mapping makes temporal contact patterns a static graph whose components give outbreak size and onset without simulation.
Cut-ins against yielding AVs cut capacity and seed phantom jams
A game-theoretic friction model predicts the worst mixed-traffic congestion near 45% automated-vehicle share.
Cut-in detection precision jumps from 4% to 51%
Learning rewards from real highway data outperforms physics-based models at predicting aggressive lane changes.
Name popularity follows a thermodynamic law
US and French name-frequency curves stay stable for 100+ years, with Gini 0.85–0.95, fitting Rayleigh-Jeans condensation.
· “Thermodynamic statistics of given names in USA and France”
A little dissent restores majority-rule transitions in large groups
Strict unanimity fails beyond four-person groups; a small tolerated minority restores transitions at any group size.
· “Interaction size and dissent tolerance in majority-rule dynamics with collective reversal”
Women and mixed-income workers stayed put in Budapest's centre
Phone data from 1.4 million devices show workplace dependence peaks near the urban core.
Two very different group structures can produce identical epidemics
Only the first q moments of group size can ever be read from aggregate epidemic data.
· “Exact moment equivalence and structural nonidentifiability in nonlinear epidemics”
One external node can capture
In simulations, stochastic soft links let a driven synchronised group keep its internal coherence more than deterministic forcing does.
· “Stochastic Non-Linear Influence in Synchronisation Dynamics”
Pairing cars with their leaders reproduces jam states analytically
Improved mean-field theory matches simulations at every density and may give exact jam-phase statistics.
· “An improved car-oriented mean-field theory for stochastic traffic flow models”
Greedy hub-first wiring cuts average network distances by 20%
New algorithm pairs high-degree nodes before random stubs, shrinking real-world networks' path lengths at near-linear cost.
· “Efficient generation of networks with minimal average shortest-path distance”
City lights can make the three-star end of Shabbat unobservable
Motsa'ei Shabbat usually comes after the 8.5-degree rule; urban skies often never show the required stars.
· “The Astronomy of Halakhic Nightfall: Calculating Ts'eit HaKokhavim and Motsa'ei Shabbat”
Record crypto crash ran subcritical
On-chain ratio 0.1–0.2 vs critical 1; 88% of forced selling hit in 30 min.
New repository standardizes 83 higher-order network datasets
Each dataset links to its source, citation guidance, conversion code, and fixed version snapshots for reproducible reuse.
· “A repository for discovery and reuse of higher-order network datasets”
Performance pay cuts the cooperation threshold from 3.4 to 2.0
Splitting group payoffs by neighbor appraisals lets cooperation emerge at a synergy factor near 2 instead of 3.4.
· “Performance appraisal promotes cooperation in spatial public goods games”
Sonification is defined by its data-to-sound rule
A philosophical analysis argues the practice stays itself in labs, concerts, and classrooms.
· “What Is Sonification? Toward a Philosophy of Sonification”
Co-sharing networks lift unreliable-news detection by 13–14%
Even with no article text, graph-aware models beat feature-only baselines on identical inputs.
· “Network Information Enhances Unreliable News Domain Detection”
Two LLM rates predict when agent swarms reach consensus
Statistical-physics condition 3π−2φ−1>0 separates ordering from repaint noise in LLM populations.
· “Microscopic dynamics of consensus formation in multi-agent LLM Naming Games”
Vulnerability curves can map climate extremes into damage maps
A five-step recipe assigns wind intensities to towers, computes damage rates, and selects sturdier designs when thresholds are exceeded.
· “Vulnerability Modeling for the Adaptation of Physical Systems to Climate Change Extremes”
Minimal rewiring moves grow quadratically with graph max degree
Sampling graphs with fixed curvature needs ever-larger moves; a degree-3 lattice basis keeps it feasible.
· “Markov and lattice bases for Forman-Ricci curvature of graphs”
Cricket record gaps follow exponent 0.8
Shuffling innings restores the classical exponent, so career ordering—not score mix—drives record timing.
· “Gap distributions between successive personal bests in cricket: Data and Models”
Preferential attachment is a perception
Surfing, introductions, and gene copying generate scale-free structure from neighbor-only decisions.
· “Local network growth: How simple rules drive network complexity”
Left-leaning think tanks drive growing policy polarization
As think tanks cite their own side more, science-based policy discussion is the main bridge left.
Moderate fusion imprecision lets biased groups find the truth
In noisy settings, imprecise belief merging beats precise merging when most agents start wrong.
· “Imprecise Belief Fusion Improves Multi-agent Social Learning”
AI text inverts as temperature rises
More temperature can make AI output less random — a hidden coordinate predicts the flip.
· “Temperature-driven inversion and nonlinear dynamics in ChatGPT-like AIs”
Lane-free traffic waves travel at lane-based congestion speeds
Chaotic, lane-free traffic still sends congestion backward at the same speeds as orderly freeways.
Male edge in epics is about position
Women are as structurally influential as men in the epics once they hold comparable network positions.
When funding pits discovery against application
The same long-term projects yield both fundamental breakthroughs and applications they were never planned to create.
