Complex networks articles from across Nature Portfolio

During extreme storms, the failure of a small fraction of transmission lines can trigger a cascade of outages in a power grid. Going beyond static approaches, it is now demonstrated that resolving the spatio-temporal interactions between the storm and the power grid is key to identifying these critical lines.

Directed hypergraphs emerge as a potent framework for analyzing social contagion phenomena, incorporating the nuances of individual heterogeneity and the amplifying effects of environmental contagion reinforcement. The authors demonstrate that the interval of bistability within discontinuous phase transitions contracts with diminishing directedness strength

Collective cooperation is found across many social and biological systems. Here, the authors find that infrequent hub updates promote the emergence of collective cooperation and develop an algorithm that optimises collective cooperation with update rates.

Citizen participation in water governance can improve the relevance, implementation, and effectiveness of public policies. However, participation can be expressed in a great diversity of forms, on a gradient ranging from mere public consultation to shared governance of natural resources. Positive outcomes ultimately depend on the conditions under which participation takes place, with key factors such as leadership, the degree of trust among stakeholders, and the interaction of public authorities with citizens. Social network analysis has been used to operationalize participatory processes, contributing to the identification of leaders, intersectoral integration, strategic planning, and conflict resolution. In this commentary, we analyze the potential and limitations of participation in water governance and illustrate it with the case of the Campina de Faro aquifer in southern Portugal. We propose that stakeholder network analysis is particularly useful for promoting decentralized decision-making and consensual water resources management. The delegation of power to different interest groups is a key process in the effectiveness of governance, which can be operationalized with network analysis techniques.

During extreme storms, the failure of a small fraction of transmission lines can trigger a cascade of outages in a power grid. Going beyond static approaches, it is now demonstrated that resolving the spatio-temporal interactions between the storm and the power grid is key to identifying these critical lines.

Predicting the large-scale behaviour of complex systems is challenging because of their underlying nonlinear dynamics. Theoretical evidence now verifies that many complex systems can be simplified and still provide an insightful description of the phenomena of interest.

Physical networks, composed of nodes and links that occupy a spatial volume, are hard to study with conventional techniques. A meta-graph approach that elucidates the impact of physicality on network structure has now been introduced.

Social connections are an important means for people to cope with adversity and illness. Thus, technologies, such as social network analysis, that can leverage close, face-to-face social networks could help optimize healthcare interventions and reduce healthcare-related costs, particularly in low-resource settings.