Volume 3 Issue 2, February 2021

Faced with an economic crisis as large and rapid as that precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, economists have turned to new ‘fast indicators’ based on big data, as Andy Haldane and Shiv Chowla of the Bank of England explain.

János Kertész and Johannes Wachs discuss how complexity science and network science are particularly useful for identifying and describing the hidden traces of economic misbehaviour such as fraud and corruption.

In February 2021, three probes from the UAE, China and the USA are expected to reach Mars.

An article in Physical Review Letters introduces a quantum algorithm for the simulation of high energy radiative processes in particle collisions, which cannot be fully captured in classical probabilistic simulations.

A paper in Communications Physics reports that cornstarch suspensions flowing down slopes form ripples like water does — but via a completely different mechanism, which involves their unusual rheology.

A paper in Science shows that diamond can be elastically stretched by up to 9% which could make it more electrically conducting.

Viruses display fascinating dynamics during their life cycle. Only recently has it become possible to probe viral dynamics at the single-particle level. This Review discusses dynamical properties of viruses and recent developments in physical virology approaches to probe such dynamics.

Economic complexity methods predict changes in the geography of economic activities and explain differences in economic growth, inequality, greenhouse emissions and labour market outcomes. This Review summarizes a decade of research on economic complexity and its applications.

Geometric insights into the structure and function of complex networks have led to exciting developments in network science. This Review Article summarizes progress in network geometry, its theory, and applications to biological, sociotechnical and other real-world networks.

Complexity economics relaxes the assumptions of neoclassical economics to assume that agents differ, that they have imperfect information about other agents and they must, therefore, try to make sense of the situation they face. This Perspective sketches the ideas of complexity economics and describes how it links to complexity science more broadly.