FuturICT Journal Publications

When Networks Network

By Elizabeth Quill

 

- When networks depend on other networks, such as a communications network that relies on a power grid, failure can cascade back and forth between the two. This behavior may explain sudden breakdowns in interacting systems. Thus, the effects of an attack on a single node can reduce an übernetwork  that starts with 12 operating nodes to just four.- 

 

Once studied solo, systems display surprising behavior when they interact.

 

Half a dozen times each night, your slumbering body performs a remarkable feat of coordination.

 

During the deepest throes of sleep, the body’s support systems run on their own timetables. Nerve cells hum along in your brain, their chitchat generating slow waves that signal sleep’s nether stages. Yet, like buses and trains with overlapping routes but unsynchronized schedules, this neural conversation has little to say to your heart, which pumps blood to its own rhythm through the body’s arteries and veins. Air likewise skips into the nostrils and down the windpipe in seemingly random spits and spats. And muscle fluctuations that make the legs twitch come and go as if in a vacuum. Networks of muscles, of brain cells, of airways and lungs, of heart and vessels operate largely independently.

 

Every couple of hours, though, in as little as 30 seconds, the barriers break down. Suddenly, there’s synchrony. All the disjointed activity of deep sleep starts to connect with its surroundings. Each network — run via the group effort of its own muscular, cellular and molecular players — joins the larger team.