Real world networks, as physical systems, are large-scale assemblages of interacting entities—such as infrastructure components, biological units, or technological devices—whose connections and dynamics are instantiated in material space and time. They are typically represented as graphs in which nodes correspond to physical objects (e.g., routers, power substations, neurons, or transportation hubs) and edges represent actual physical or functional interactions (e.g., cables, transmission lines, synapses, or routes). Their structure often exhibits nontrivial properties such as heterogeneity, modularity, and small-world or scale-free characteristics, which critically influence robustness, failure propagation, transport efficiency, and collective dynamical behavior.
Due to climate change, extreme weather events such as flooding are expected to increase in Germany in the future. This poses hidden risks to the health care system that have hardly been the focus of resilience planning to ...
Environment
Feb 18, 2026
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16
Quantum technologies, systems that process, transfer or store information leveraging quantum mechanical effects, could tackle some real-world problems faster and more effectively than their classical counterparts. In recent ...
The global climate is in an imbalance. Potential "tipping elements" include the Greenland ice sheet, coral reefs, and the Amazon rainforest. Together they form a network that can collapse if just one individual component ...
General Physics
May 6, 2025
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27
Data security on the internet is under threat: in the future, quantum computers could decode even encrypted files sent over the internet in no time. Researchers worldwide are, therefore, experimenting with quantum networks ...
Optics & Photonics
Feb 11, 2025
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98
An international research team led by QuTech has demonstrated a network connection between quantum processors over metropolitan distances. Their result marks a key advance from early research networks in the lab towards a ...
Quantum Physics
Oct 30, 2024
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157
It has never been easier to spread false or misleading information online. The anonymous, impersonal nature of the internet, combined with advanced tools like artificial intelligence, makes it trivial for bad actors to manipulate ...
General Physics
Jul 30, 2024
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111
With the emergence of internet services such as AI-generated content and virtual reality, the demand for global capacity has surged, significantly intensifying pressures on fiber-optic communication systems. To address this ...
Optics & Photonics
May 13, 2024
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53
Networks can represent changing systems, like the spread of an epidemic or the growth of groups in a population of people. But the structure of these networks can change, too, as links appear or vanish over time. To better ...
General Physics
Feb 23, 2024
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77
In a new study, scientists have investigated the pervasive low-rank hypothesis in complex systems, demonstrating that despite high-dimensional nonlinear dynamics, many real networks exhibit rapidly decreasing singular values, ...
The Manhattan Project was a top-secret program that culminated in the development of the first atomic bombs during World War 2. This covert and controversial research endeavor involved many gifted and reputable scientists, ...
