Articles

Family specific spatial borrowing in multimodal urban reconstruction: a leave one neighborhood out study of Cincinnati

BREEZE: Bioclimatic Route Evaluation for Environmental haZard avoidancE

Where to start with urban Digital Twins? Backward-chaining key indicators for cross-sector water, heat, and housing impact analysis

Unlinked: Why alters reported in name generators cannot be used to estimate personal network size

The security–efficiency trade-off in ransomware networks

The relational structure of corporate ignorance production

The decay of impact with network distance in linear diffusion processes

The Urban Model Platform: a public backbone for modeling and simulation in urban digital twins

Supporting wildfire mitigation investment prioritization

Street view video for urban sensing: Potential for measuring urban vitality

Returning network findings: An art gallery as a report-back in a rural community

Residential heating emissions tool in the Climate Action Navigator: High-resolution estimation based on open data

Open-access model for detecting openly dumped dispersed municipal solid waste from crowdsourced UAV imagery in Sub-Saharan Africa

Network members can hide from group centrality measures

Neighborhood-scale barrier-free accessibility assessment using handheld LiDAR point cloud

Multi-layer network analysis of deliberation in an online discussion platform: The case of Reddit

Mapping public disability-inclusive awareness in Chinese cities: Insights from geotagged social media data

Incorporating spatio-temporal population dynamics into deep learning models for small-area population forecasting

HyperLayout: A decoupled and planning-oriented framework for parcel-level building layout generation

From lifestyle to citizenship: Social influence and political consumerism in egocentric networks

From heuristics to data: A parcel-level representation of site planning layouts from multimodal urban evidence

Exponential-family random graph models in resident-healthcare provider networks: An application using data from long-term healthcare facilities in the United States

Estimating visible deprivation through the analysis of street view image embeddings

Corrigendum to “Unlinked: Why alters reported in name generators cannot be used to estimate personal network size” [Soc. Netw. 88 (2027) 1–7]

Budgeting urban tree canopy expansion for cooling-benefit equality: A graph neural network-based multi-objective framework

Beyond 2D land consumption: A scaling-law framework for evaluating 3D urban space consumption and population dynamics in fifteen East Asian megacities

An integrated simulation-optimisation framework for future public electric vehicle charger deployment

A representation-explanation framework for flow-based border effects on intra-urban commuting using geographically weighted additive gravity model and machine learning

A novel simulation-based approach to optimizing road networks for disaster evacuation in dense urban informal settlements

A multi-scale analysis of spatiotemporal variability and environmental influences on urban noise

A local Shapley metric for spatial validation of urban infrastructure deterioration

Joint building height estimation and pose optimization using single-view smartphone image

Interpretable mapping of fine-grained urban building functions from street-view images using foundation models

Identifying micro-scale risk zones for climate-driven emergency medical demand: A spatiotemporal machine learning study in Beijing

How multi-sensory experience shapes place-based human sentiments: A hyperlocal analysis using environmental sensing and social media data in the Bronx, New York City

GeoPandas: Fundamental data structures for vector spatial data in Python

Function over morphology: Understanding street environment and pedestrian flow in urban villages through UAV-based tracking

FloodLang and FloodLoc-Four: A bilingual dataset and fine-grained multilevel framework for flood-related geospatial information understanding

Evaluating the digital divide in public transport services: A natural language processing analysis of user experiences in Birmingham

Editorial Board

Disentangling nonlinear and context-contingent built environment effects on social encounter opportunities: Evidence from explainable spatial machine learning in 15-min community life circles

Deep learning reveals cross-platform consistency in street view imagery for urban perception mapping

City2Graph: A Python library for Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks and spatial analysis in urban systems

Census-validated agent-based modeling of immigrant settlement and diversity in Metro Vancouver

Assessing the significance of intra- and inter-species interactions using probabilistic space-time prisms and agent-based null models

An interpretable hybrid multiscale geographically weighted XGBoost (HMGWX) model with an empirical application to urban transport systems

A global structural typology of cities from urban centers

From narrative generation to interpretive stabilization: generative AI and the mechanism of ethical understanding

Emergence of diffusion models from associative memory through memorization and generalization

Dense Associative Memories (DenseAMs) are generalizations of Hopfield networks that store training data at local minima of the energy landscape. When the amount of training data exceeds the critical memory storage capacity, new local minima (different from the training data) emerge.

The extracellular turret as a structural hub for voltage sensor-pore coupling in HCN channels

Hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels are essential for rhythmic electrical activity in cardiac and neuronal cells, and their dysfunction underlies disorders such as arrhythmia and epilepsy.

Spin-adapted neural network wavefunctions in real space

Single-cell heterogeneity of adipose eosinophils is shaped by sex and RELMα and linked to macrophage communication networks in obesity

Eosinophils are immune cells with terminal effector functions in type 2 immune responses, yet recent findings suggest that they exhibit functional plasticity and heterogeneity dependent on tissue-specific cues.

Reliability-based arbitration reveals heterogeneous model-based and model-free reinforcement learning strategies linked to compulsivity and impulsivity

Predicting protein electrostatics with protein language models

Ionization states are crucial to protein function, yet predicting their equilibrium constants remains challenging. Here we present KaML-ESMs, sequence-based neural networks built on the ESM protein language models and trained on the GAINES-augmented PKAD-3r dataset.

Haji Bushra of Gata and the making of Islamic education in nineteenth-century South Wollo, Ethiopia: institutional formation and community agency

Scholarship on Islam in Ethiopia has examined religious authority, scholarly networks, and Muslim communities, but has paid less attention to how local centres of Islamic learning were established and sustained.

Distributed community detection in historical graphs

Democratizing reliable knowledge-seeking with MyGPT: a privacy-first, open-source retrieval-augmented generation platform

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed knowledge discovery, but their use in sensitive domains is limited by privacy concerns and risks of data leakage. Moreover, LLMs may hallucinate when queried about information outside their training data, undermining their reliability for scientific, clinical, or policy-related tasks.

Spatial differentiation and driving mechanisms of Tibetan and Qiang traditional villages in northwestern Sichuan, China

Northwestern Sichuan Province in China, characterized by its unique geography and rich ethnic culture, hosts numerous Tibetan–Qiang Traditional Villages (TTVNS) of significant conservation value.

Research on the impact of artificial intelligence on the pollution governance mechanism and pathways in border regions

Privileged representational axes in biological and artificial neural networks

Predicting follow-up cognition using estimated structural and functional connectivity networks and artificial intelligence in multiple sclerosis

Exploring the impact of AI, peer, and teacher feedback on university students’ L2 writing feedback literacy

Student writing feedback literacy (FL) has emerged as a critical competence in second language (L2) education, yet most studies focus mainly on teacher or peer feedback, overlooking how feedback from different sources may differentially shape studnets’ FL development.

Dynamics of collective creativity in AI art competitions

Creativity is a fundamental part of cultural evolution, but the mechanisms by which groups produce novelty are notoriously difficult to infer from the historical record.

Chemistry-infused bandit framework for interpretable autonomous campaign of electrocatalysis

Autonomous experimentation offers a time-efficient route towards accelerated catalyst discovery, but current practices often rely on black-box models that are difficult to interpret.

Biodiversity is a key motivation for European urban green space planning and management

Many urban green spaces are ecologically degraded. Yet, when designed and managed using ecologically motivated practices, green spaces can support biodiversity. However, many municipalities have not yet adopted strategies to enhance biodiversity.

Between pixels and emotions: semiotic-NLP deconstruction of cultural heritage’s social media image

This study investigates how digital transformation reshapes the representation and perception of cultural heritage within contemporary tourism by analysing social media narratives of three key urban heritage attractions in Ankara: Hamamönü, Ankara Castle, and the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations.

Access-based network growth: preferential attachment with capacity, cost, and connectivity

ACCESS2 study: the potential for autonomous AI to mitigate disparities in diabetic retinopathy screening in youth

Topology and evolution of global transcriptional regulatory networks across the Klebsiella pneumoniae pan-genome

The Virtual Biotech: A multi-agent AI framework for therapeutic discovery and development

Drug development requires evidence integration across biological scales and modalities, but relevant tools are fragmented. We introduce the Virtual Biotech, an organization of artificial intelligence (AI) agents modeled on a drug-development company, with agentic divisions spanning target discovery, safety assessment, modality selection, and clinical development.

The AI debate is missing half the system

Last month, leading executives of artificial intelligence (AI) companies warned the United Nations Security Council about the risks of losing human control over this rapidly advancing technology.

Talent policy attention and online public response: a nonlinear association across 232 Chinese cities

System-level reorganization of gene networks underlies the nurse-to-forager transition in honeybees

Division of labor in social insects is enabled by coordinated changes in physiology, neural signaling, and gene regulation, yet it remains unclear to what extent behavioral maturation reflects incremental changes in individual genes and/or a reorganization of transcriptomic regulation at the system level.

Synthetic data publishing using Bayesian Network: a case study of COVID-19 patients data in Jakarta, Indonesia

Structure-coefficient theorem for evolutionary games on dynamic networks

Sequential diagnosis with language models

Frontier language models are tested on step-by-step diagnosis of hard clinical cases and compared with physicians on both accuracy and the cost of the tests they order.

Optimising resource management in data-scarce environments: A modelling approach for Greater Cairo

Pressing environmental challenges present significant obstacles to cities’ sustainable development and underscore the need for effective resource management.

Machine learning detection of small Strombolian eruptions in noisy multi-temporal infrared images: Toward continuous monitoring

We show that a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained on denoised multi-temporal infrared images (single images whose red, green, and blue channels hold three consecutive frames so that change between them appears as color) can detect small Strombolian eruptions that previously fell below the detection limits of conventional automated methods.

Human-AI collaboration in crisis response: understanding adoption barriers and enablers for generative AI in emergency decision-making

Examines what helps and what holds back the use of generative AI by people making decisions in emergencies.

From authenticity ecosystems to human–AI hybrid societies

Dynamic networks can promote pro-sociality

Structure coefficients give a single way to identify which changing network structures support cooperation, altruism, fairness and trust.

Can maths survive AI? Fields medallist Terence Tao calls for a ‘Maths 2.0’ world

As machines get faster at solving problems, Terence Tao argues that mathematicians should build a culture that rewards human understanding rather than a growing pile of published solutions.

Bridging competitiveness and sustainability in tourism: a multistage network DEA approach aligned with the SDGs

Across fields, AI finds solutions hiding in plain sight

“BootLoops” software enabled researchers to quickly find and attack problems in 22 disciplines

AI-generated content-plagiarism versus institutional silence: comparative insights on responses of higher education to rapid technological changes in China and Japan

AI biosecurity must include agriculture

A phase transition for the strength of weak ties

Granovetter's ``strength of weak ties'' argument links local triadic closure to the global importance of weak relationships, but it does not by itself quantify when strong ties can or cannot sustain large-scale connectivity.

Using AI to offer personalized health advice

Emma Pierson looks at where AI health-advice tools are heading and at how such systems should be tested before people rely on them.

Urban shrinkage vs heritage protection: exploring the dilemma and promotion path of built heritage protection under urban decline

To heal sick cities, scientists and residents must work together

A conversation with Tolullah Oni on improving urban health with residents rather than for them, and on the platform she built to channel the expertise of African diaspora scholars back to the continent.

The right of way in Dublin

The microfoundational view of capability creation and environmental alertness of multinational corporations in emerging markets

The anatomy of a personal health agent

A multi-agent AI framework coordinates data analysis, medical reasoning and health coaching over long-term wearable and clinical records.

Programmable design of functional proteins from natural language

Pinal, a 16-billion-parameter model, turns plain-language descriptions into working protein designs, with lab-confirmed activity and no rounds of iterative optimization.

Molecular characterization of large cell neuroendocrine carcinoma of the lung by multilayered omics analysis

Institutional lock-in in urban building may constrain climate ambitions

HRDPath: an explainable multi-model deep learning architecture for predicting homologous recombination deficiency from histopathology images

Homologous recombination deficiency (HRD) is a critical biomarker for guiding treatment decisions in high-grade serous tubo-ovarian carcinoma (HGSOC), a cancer with few reliable biomarkers. However, existing genomics-based tests for HRD are variable, expensive, and time-consuming.

Framing science in the digital age: exploring the relationships between general, social media-specific, and research-specific news values and audience engagement with science news on Sina Weibo

Field-induced near-unity spin polarization in a highly emissive organic diradical

Enhancing simulations of disordered protein ensembles with chemical shift restraints in coarse-grained models

With more than one third of the human proteome being structurally disordered, intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) are key contributors to complex cellular functions, despite their highly dynamic conformational ensembles remaining elusive to conventional techniques in structural biology.

Cold activates a BH2 metabolic network promoting longevity and proteostasis

Moderately cold temperatures extend lifespan and promote health across species 1–3 , yet the molecular mechanisms underlying these benefits remain unclear. Here we define a metabolite-driven, multi-tissue signalling system that links cold temperature to enhanced longevity and proteostasis in Caenorhabditis elegans .

Causal asymmetry suggests productivity underlies scientific collaboration

Scientific productivity and collaboration are closely related, yet the causal direction between these two dimensions of academic careers remains unclear.

Carbon emission and health impacts of remote working: A case study of the Helsinki capital region

Remote working can reduce commuting-related carbon emissions but may also lower population physical activity levels. This study examines these trade-offs in the Helsinki Capital Region by modelling changes in commuting and worktime travel under three scenarios: no remote work, current levels, and full potential uptake.

CD28 costimulation is organized by signaling condensates and counteracted by PD-1

T cell activation relies on the coordinated integration of T cell receptor (TCR) and cosignaling pathways, yet how these signals are physically organized remains unclear.

An AI tool improves weather forecasts up to a month ahead

A new AI method refines both physics-based and AI weather models, giving accurate forecasts of rain, temperature and pressure three to five weeks out and earlier warning of extremes.

AI doctors’ orders come with a sky-high bill

When large language models play doctor, they order more tests, referrals and prescriptions than human physicians do, which pushes up the cost of care.

A 700-kilometre copper supply network in Bronze Age China revealed by multi-proxy ore fingerprinting

Vast new fossil record challenges story of Earth’s ‘big five’ mass extinctions

An AI model trained on almost four million fossils suggests that three of the five great mass extinctions may have unfolded more gradually than the textbook account holds.

Strong field spectroscopy of many-body interactions in solids

High-order harmonic generation (HHG) in solids offers a promising route to compact ultrafast sources of quantum light, but its efficiency and coherence are limited by ultrafast dephasing of laser-driven electron–hole polarization.

High-risk antimicrobial resistance genomic traits in multidrug-resistant Salmonella across China’s food chain: projections to 2050

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is rising globally, yet factors shaping its genomic evolution remain poorly understood.

Evolution of the arbuscular mycorrhizal regulatory network through differential GRAS gene retention and protein interaction in land plants

Plants rely on an ancient genetic “toolkit” to establish arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis (AMS) with fungal partners. However, the symbiotic outcomes vary among AMS hosts, indicating divergence in downstream transcriptional reprogramming after the perception of symbiotic signals.

Enhancing language learning with AI: the role of AI service quality in learning satisfaction and performance in mobile-assisted language learning applications

Diminishing cooling returns of urban greening amid a warming climate

Urban greening is widely prioritized as a nature-based solution to mitigating intensifying heat extremes in the context of climate change, yet its long-term global efficacy remains inadequately quantified.

Beyond compliance: how voluntary environmental certification drives corporate green innovation in China?

Use AI to heterogenize science

Toward cooler cities by larger homogeneous functional clusters

Urban heat island (UHI) intensifies heat-related risks and environmental degradation in cities worldwide, yet existing mitigation strategies have largely overlooked how the spatial scale of homogeneous functional building clusters influences local climate.

Three reasons why AI is not conscious and perhaps never will be

The impact of corporate technology for social good on corporate performance: evidence from Chinese listed companies

The case for AI degrowth

Network centrality position shapes urban innovation capacities: evidence from China’s interlocking corporate network

Modeling the global potential of smart farming innovations

Smart farming innovations can improve agricultural productivity, resilience, and environmental sustainability, yet their real-world impact hinges on their diffusion dynamics, which in turn depend on their economic viability.

Mapping the pulse of urban nighttime economy: spatial patterns and behavioral insights in Kunming, China

Discovering network resilience formulas with symbolized reinforcement learning

Diagnosing 15-minute community life circle service levels and simulating policy scenarios in a high-density urban core: Shanghai’s Huangpu District

Decoding urban thermal well-being: bridging the gap between physical cooling and social perception in wetlands via AI-enhanced sensing

Urban wetland parks serve as vital infrastructure for climate resilience, yet a critical epistemological gap remains between their objective thermodynamic performance and the subjective thermal well-being of visitors.

Coupled ecological pressures in urban environments: regional heterogeneity and drivers of carbon and water footprints

Closed-loop photoreactor design enabled by machine learning and digital twins

Designing efficient photoreactors remains challenging due to the complex interplay of reflection, scattering, and absorption. Here, we introduce a closed-loop workflow integrating ray-tracing digital twins with multi-objective Bayesian optimization to design photoreactors with high photon capture and uniform irradiation.

Cities alter the latitudinal diversity gradient of birds in North America

Biotic response networks are an important organizer of the transcriptome in wild Arabidopsis thaliana populations

Extensive laboratory experimentation has revealed conserved molecular pathways controlling growth and stress responses in plants, yet how these programs operate in natural settings remains poorly understood.

Audio long read: How to stay smart in the age of AI — the science of critical thinking

As concern grows that AI could dull our reasoning, this episode walks through research on practical ways to keep critical-thinking skills sharp.

MASLD-Mitochondrial Digital Twin: Mapping mitonuclear epistasis to predict disease trajectory and systemic bioenergetic homeostasis

Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) is a prevalent chronic disorder with marked clinical heterogeneity and divergent outcomes. Current pathophysiological models fail to fully account for inter-individual variation in progression toward steatohepatitis and systemic multimorbidity.

From appropriate use to dependency: How AI attitude and use motivations shape university students’ AI dependency

De novo design of lipopeptides with antimicrobial potency enabled by a chain-as-prompt deep learning framework

Air-pollution emissions and population urbanisation in China: provincial co-evolution under structural transformation

The effects of artificial intelligence and environmental pollution on green growth in China

The basins of attraction of soft-sphere packings are not fractal

The energy landscape picture is a central tool to study many-body systems. In particular, the energy landscapes of glass-forming liquids, jammed packings, constraint satisfaction problems, or neural networks contain a plethora of minima corresponding to competing states.

Systemic collapse emergence from climate-induced perturbations in transportation networks

The interaction between human infrastructures and external events results in loss of functionality or even complete system disruption through a snowball effect of cascading failures. Their complex interplay challenges their prevention, affecting the human population that rely on their functionality.

Shaping relational value in linear cultural heritage through green open spaces: insights from the Grand Canal

The focus of sustainable heritage development has shifted from the isolated preservation of physical vestiges to the continuous construction of symbiotic relationships among the heritage, the public, and the environment. As critical areas for such interactions, green open spaces facilitate the cultivation of relational values.

PhD students who write dissertations with AI less likely to stay in academia

PCS-UQ: Uncertainty quantification via the Predictability–Computability–Stability framework

As machine learning (ML) enters high-stakes domains, trustworthy uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for safety. In this paper we introduce PCS-UQ, a framework based on the predictability, computability, and stability (PCS) principles for veridical data science.

Insights from coproduced scenarios toward urban sustainability transformations

Urban sustainability transformations call for fundamental shifts in how cities are organized, developed, and governed. Yet we need a better understanding of the diversity of visions and pathways that can enable transformative change.

Impact of major public health events on inter-city connectedness and cross-regional spillover of housing prices

How national missions reshape policy networks: evidence from China’s STI policy-making collaborative network, 1978–2023

History’s long-secret codes are being cracked by amateurs using AI

Generative AI adoption and innovative behavior among Gen Z students: a deep-learning based dual-stage PLS-SEM-ANN analysis

Explainable artificial intelligence reveals spatially divergent effects of global change on mammals

Understanding how global change reshapes species distributions remains a central challenge in ecology, yet most global assessments treat environmental drivers as static, uniform, or aggregate influences. This obscures where, why, and how specific drivers generate ecological risk or opportunity.

Efficient and accurate steering of large language models through attention-guided feature learning

Activation steering, or direct manipulation of internal activations to guide large language model (LLM) responses toward specific semantic concepts, is emerging as a promising avenue for both understanding how semantic concepts are stored within LLMs and advancing LLM capabilities.

Decomposition analysis of the disparities in depressive symptoms among middle-aged and older adults between urban and rural areas in China: adverse childhood experiences are a contributing factor

Beyond compliance: environmental regulation and corporate responsible innovation

AI can persuade people to take political actions

There is substantial concern about the ability of advanced AI to influence people’s behavior.

A neural operator framework for data-driven discovery of stability and receptivity in physical systems

Understanding how complex systems respond to perturbations, such as whether they will remain stable or what their most sensitive patterns are, is a fundamental challenge across science and engineering.

A genetically encoded local learning rule enables physical learning in engineered bacteria

Training physical neural networks directly in matter remains difficult because most platforms do not store and update weights within the same physical substrate. Here we show that engineered Escherichia coli can implement a genetically encoded local learning rule acting on persistent biological memory.

A dynamic and viewing-direction-aware 3D visuospatial analysis framework for indoor environments based on embodied 3D isovist

Quantitative analysis of dynamic visuospatial experience is increasingly important as behavioural experiments provide fine-grained positional and viewing records. Isovist analysis is a well-established method for visuospatial analysis of architectural spaces, and Embodied 3D Isovist represents one extension of this approach to three-dimensional analysis.

The urban environment as a determinant of health

The impact of peer effect on corporate social responsibility: the moderating role of rent-seeking behavior and stakeholder pressure

Suspected distortion of citations in high-impact cancer journals

Research and scholarship are shaped by article citations, which underpin the communication of ideas, assignment of credit, journal impact factors, and author career progression.

Restructuring hydrogen-bonding networks via hydroxyl-functionalized covalent organic frameworks for efficient nitrate electroreduction

Electrocatalytic nitrate reduction reaction (NO 3 RR) is a promising strategy for nitrate removal and ammonia synthesis, but its efficiency is largely limited by sluggish proton transfer kinetics and poor reaction selectivity.

NIH revives network to study emerging diseases—but its new restrictions baffle scientists

Ban on hunting for new viruses in wildlife is at odds with program’s mission, researchers say

Multi-AI agent framework reveals the “oxide gatekeeper” in aluminum nanoparticle oxidation

Aluminum nanoparticles (ANPs) are among the most energy-dense solid fuels, yet the atomic mechanisms governing their transition from passivated particles to highly reactive states remain elusive.

Market dilution, fair use, and generative AI

Market dilution theory, which could affect AI use in science, requires conceptual clarity and empirical evidence

Living with a hot desert climate in Dhahran

Is AI eroding PhD students’ critical thinking and analysis skills?

Impact of farmland protection policy on urban land use efficiency: perspectives from the transformation of local government land supply strategy

Exploring the transition from traditional museums to digital experiences: implications for online engagement and willingness to pay

Estimating the threat of AI-agent responding across online survey platforms

Recent research and advances in LLMs have led to widespread concern that AI agents could pose as human online survey-takers. However, it remains unclear how prevalent AI agents are on survey research platforms and how to effectively detect AI agents.

Does digital transformation of high-carbon emission enterprises promote green technological innovation quality? —The moderating role of executive green awareness and corporate social responsibility

Community detection reveals multiple rich cores in Indonesia’s intranational production network

Community detection on Indonesia’s domestic production network reveals several rich cores rather than a single centre.

Being recognized as human by AI: algorithmic disrespect and the crisis of recognition in the digital age

Atomic functional site scaffolding in biopolymers with RFdiffusion3

The catalytic and other sophisticated functions of biomolecules arise from the placement of many atoms in three-dimensional space.

ArXiv versus AI slop: will capping preprint submissions work?

AI takes a bite out of math’s hardest problem

A trove of AI papers includes progress on the Riemann hypothesis, a famous puzzle about prime numbers

AI literacy in student translation practices: evidence from ChatGPT use in Hong Kong

A quantitative framework for assessing narrative environments in historic districts using space syntax and agent-based crowd simulation: a case study of Xun County, China

Combines space syntax and crowd simulation to assess how historic districts tell their story to visitors.

A multi-dimensional resilience assessment framework for indoor aging-friendly environments: LLM-assisted indicator construction using Google Gemini Pro

Computational propaganda campaigns by domestic political actors in Pakistan on Facebook

Tracks 400 hashtag campaigns by Pakistani political actors on Facebook: how they spread, what bots and spam accounts do, and who starts and amplifies them.

Urban scaling of basic education systems of Chinese cities

Applies urban scaling laws to the basic education systems of Chinese cities.

The spatial reach of mobility interactions in urban systems

A new spatial range exponent measures how movement organises a city. Across 12 US metros it sits in a narrow band despite very different urban forms, and it tracks disruption and health outcomes.

Simulated responses from large language models are weak proxies for human economic preferences across 74 countries

Simulating a global preference survey, LLMs reproduce some demographic patterns but miss cultural differences, especially in lower-income countries.

Revisiting the urban past virtually to enhance well-being for older adults

Immersive virtual reconstructions of lost Hong Kong street scenes are used to measure how revisiting the city’s past affects older residents, body and mind.

Microdelays disrupt online learning

Data from more than 80,000 learners show that brief loading lags from slow connections are enough to impair online learning.

Wiretap surveillance of criminal networks does not resemble other types of collaborative networks

Criminal networks reconstructed from wiretaps turn out to look structurally different from other kinds of collaboration network.

Stability of egocentric social networks in children: Personal and functional dynamics across microsystems

Follows how stable children’s personal networks are across the different settings of their everyday lives.

Selfish and prosocial individuals both distort their actions’ impact, but selfish distortions can be more contagious

Both selfish and prosocial people overstate the social good of their choices, but self-serving distortions spread more readily to others.

Introducing AI to an online petition platform changed outputs but not outcomes

After Change.org added an AI drafting tool, petitions became more alike, but they did not become more successful.

From supply chain networks to diplomatic alignment: a dynamic network analysis using temporal ERGMs

Uses temporal exponential random graph models to connect supply-chain ties with countries’ diplomatic alignment over time.

Visual narratives of disaster on Instagram: a multimodal AI-assisted analysis

Uses multimodal AI to read how disasters are narrated visually on Instagram.

From epistemic promises to real world practices: the ongoing becoming of 3D models and urban digital twins in municipal planning

Follows how 3D city models and digital twins are actually taken up in municipal planning, set against what they promise.

Tracing the truth: a critical review of propagation tracking strategies in social networks

Reviews the explanatory and predictive models used to track how rumours spread through online social networks.

When transparency falls short: auditing platform moderation during a high-stakes election

An audit of how a platform moderated content during a major election, and of how much its transparency data actually reveals.

Urban trees associated with a reduction in negative sentiment with stronger links during COVID-19

Pairing high-resolution satellite imagery with geotagged posts links tree canopy to less negative sentiment, with stronger effects during the pandemic and clear canopy thresholds.

Algorithmic systems, human agency and the future of platform research

Hosseinmardi, Dutta and Watts argue that online consumption should be studied through both algorithmic mechanisms and human choice, rather than by blaming algorithms alone.

Large language models as human proxies

A review that sorts the ways LLMs are used as stand-ins for people, and sets out the evaluation methods and validity criteria each use requires.

The ecology of urban segregation

Opens a PNAS special feature on the ecology of segregation: how social and racial divides in cities intertwine with their environments.

Housing tenure, climate resilience, and ecological segregation

City-wide infrastructure mandates, such as separating stormwater from sewage, can fall hardest on residents of not-for-profit housing, an inequity rooted in technocratic governance.

Depression risk associated with idealized sentiment toward urban places on social media

A framework that reads emotional responses to urban places from social media uncovers complex links between how people feel about places and their risk of depression.

Comparing urban network morphologies: a new living metric and a framework for evaluating procedurally generated city layouts

Proposes a new metric for comparing street-network forms and a framework for judging how realistic computer-generated city layouts are.

When authors are the best judges of their work

At a major machine-learning conference, authors’ private rankings of their own submissions predicted later citations better than peer-review scores.

Understanding pre- and post-COVID urban neighborhood dynamics: a study analyzing georeferenced tweets for New York City

Uses georeferenced tweets to compare how New York City neighbourhoods behaved before and after COVID-19.

Hidden living-condition deficits in small and medium-sized cities

Mapping built form across 5,132 cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America shows that more than a third of people in constrained neighbourhoods live outside the megacities.

Connecting application behavior to undermatching in New York City school choice

In New York City’s high-school match, Black and Hispanic students undermatch about 1.5 times as often as their peers, and behavioural nudges can help close the gap.

Tracing the unseen: a deep dive into mobility behavior exposure

A close look at how human mobility behaviour can be exposed through movement data.

Integrating Large Language Models and knowledge graphs to capture political viewpoints in news media

Combines LLMs with knowledge graphs to identify the political viewpoints expressed in news coverage.

Recommendations for conducting ethical network research

A group of network researchers sets out practical recommendations for doing social network research ethically.

Concept drift in event prediction from social media

Six years of tweets let simple models predict Black Lives Matter protests in New York City. Hashtag volume beats text content, and the online signals shift over time.

Transferable human mobility network reconstruction with neuroGravity

A physics-informed deep learning model rebuilds mobility flows from sparse data and transfers to unseen cities, working best where segregation levels match. It yields flow proxies for over 1,200 cities.

What is the best shape of a city?

Takes on an old question for urban analytics: which city forms work best.

Uncovering latent urban mobility patterns via smart-card and survey data fusion

Fusing transit smart-card records with travel surveys recovers multimodal origin–destination flows that agree with independent traffic data, a scalable tool for planning.

Quantifying racial inequality in transit access across New York City

Combining transit data with 66 million mobility records, the study finds that minorities in New York City have far lower access to jobs and services, and that the transit network deepens residential segregation by about 27%.

Towards a societal AI alignment benchmark for evaluating human–machine value convergence

Proposes a benchmark that compares LLM and human value judgments, drawing on a survey of people and flagging biases in how models form sentiment.

Digital twins for cities – The rise of the socio-technical system

Argues that urban digital twins are becoming socio-technical systems rather than purely technical models.

Multilayer network science: theory, methods, and applications

A broad review by leading network scientists covering the theory of multilayer networks, the methods for analysing them and where they are applied.

Exploring urban science

Michael Batty’s editorial on the scope and direction of urban science.

Predicting the role of inequalities on human mobility patterns

Models how social and economic inequalities shape the ways people move and migrate.

Where to start with urban Digital Twins?

A starting guide for researchers and cities setting out to build an urban digital twin.

Temporal heterogeneity shapes diffusion dynamics in complex networks

Network diffusion models are extended beyond memoryless timing to capture the irregular rhythms of real spreading, from social contagion to brain dynamics.

Revealing exacerbated socioeconomic stratification of urban mobility: A case study in Beijing, China

Finds that socioeconomic stratification in how people move around Beijing has grown sharper.

OptimalStop: Predictability–complexity trade-off for optimising stop detection in human mobility data

Tunes stop detection in human mobility data by balancing how predictable and how complex the resulting trajectories are.

Modelling the spillover from online engagement to offline protest: stochastic dynamics and mean-field approximations on networks

Models how online engagement spills over into offline protest, using stochastic dynamics on networks.

Integrating multilayer transport networks into location-based accessibility modelling for urban land use analysis

Each public-transport mode becomes a layer of a multilayer network, with transfers between them, giving more realistic accessibility maps and a way to judge service equity.

Impact of one-way streets on diffusive transport

Studies how making streets one-way changes diffusive transport across a street network.

Embedded inequality: Personal network dynamics and mental health during COVID-19

Examines how changes in people’s personal networks during the pandemic related to their mental health, and how inequality ran through those networks.