Atypical viral dynamics from transport through popular places

Shockwavelike Behavior across Social Media

Online communities featuring "anti-X" hate and extremism, somehow thrive online despite moderator pressure. We present a first-principles theory of their dynamics, which accounts for the fact that the online population comprises diverse individuals and evolves in time. The resulting equation represents a novel generalization of nonlinear fluid physics and explains the observed behavior across scales. Its shockwavelike solutions explain how, why, and when such activity rises from "out-of-nowhere," and show how it can be delayed, reshaped, and even prevented by adjusting the online collective chemistry. This theory and findings should also be applicable to anti-X activity in next-generation ecosystems featuring blockchain platforms and Metaverses.

Vector Surveillance, Host Species Richness, and Demographic Factors as West Nile Disease Risk Indicators

West Nile virus (WNV) is the most common arthropod-borne virus (arbovirus) in the United States (US) and is the leading cause of viral encephalitis in the country. The virus has affected tens of thousands of US persons total since its 1999 North America introduction, with thousands of new infections reported annually. Approximately 1% of humans infected with WNV acquire neuroinvasive West Nile Disease (WND) with severe encephalitis and risk of death. Research describing WNV ecology is needed to improve public health surveillance, monitoring, and risk assessment. We applied Bayesian joint-spatiotemporal modeling to assess the association of vector surveillance data, host species richness, and a variety of other environmental and socioeconomic disease risk factors with neuroinvasive WND throughout the conterminous US. Our research revealed that an aging human population was the strongest disease indicator, but climatic and vector-host biotic interactions were also significant in determining risk of neuroinvasive WND. Our analysis also identified a geographic region of disproportionately high neuroinvasive WND disease risk that parallels the Continental Divide, and extends southward from the US-Canada border in the states of Montana, North Dakota, and Wisconsin to the US-Mexico border in western Texas. Our results aid in unraveling complex WNV ecology and can be applied to prioritize disease surveillance locations and risk assessment.

Multiscale dynamical network mechanisms underlying aging of an online organism from birth to death

We present the continuous-time evolution of an online organism network from birth to death which crosses all organizational and temporal scales, from individual components through to the mesoscopic and entire system scale. These continuous-time data reveal a lifespan driven by punctuated, real-time co-evolution of the structural and functional networks. Aging sees these structural and functional networks gradually diverge in terms of their small-worldness and eventually their connectivity. Dying emerges as an extended process associated with the formation of large but disjoint functional sub-networks together with an increasingly detached core. Our mathematical model quantifies the very different impacts that interventions will have on the overall lifetime, period of initial growth, peak of potency, and duration of old age, depending on when and how they are administered. In addition to their direct relevance to online extremism, our findings may offer insight into aging in other network systems of comparable complexity for which extensive in vivo data is not yet available.

Simple visit behavior unifies complex Zika outbreaks

New outbreaks of Zika in the U.S. are imminent. Human nature dictates that many individuals will continue to revisit affected ‘Ground Zero’ patches, whether out of choice, work or family reasons − yet this feature is missing from traditional epidemiological analyses. Here we show that this missing visit-revisit mechanism is by itself capable of explaining quantitatively the 2016 human Zika outbreaks in all three Ground Zero patches. Our findings reveal counterintuitive ways in which this human flow can be managed to tailor any future outbreak’s duration, severity and time-to-peak. Effective public health planning can leverage these results to impact the evolution of future outbreaks via soft control of the overall human flow, as well as to suggest best-practice visitation behavior for local residents.

Systematic Review: Land Cover, Meteorological, and Socioeconomic Determinants of Aedes Mosquito Habitat for Risk Mapping

Asian tiger and yellow fever mosquitoes (Aedes albopictus and Ae. aegypti) are global nuisances and are competent vectors for viruses such as Chikungunya (CHIKV), Dengue (DV), and Zika (ZIKV). This review aims to analyze available spatiotemporal distribution models of Aedes mosquitoes and their influential factors. A combination of five sets of 3-5 keywords were used to retrieve all relevant published models. Five electronic search databases were used: PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE, Scopus, and Google Scholar through 17 May 2017. We generated a hierarchical decision tree for article selection. We identified 21 relevant published studies that highlight different combinations of methodologies, models and influential factors. Only a few studies adopted a comprehensive approach highlighting the interaction between environmental, socioeconomic, meteorological and topographic systems. The selected articles showed inconsistent findings in terms of number and type of influential factors affecting the distribution of Aedes vectors, which is most likely attributed to: (i) limited availability of high-resolution data for physical variables, (ii) variation in sampling methods; Aedes feeding and oviposition behavior; (iii) data collinearity and statistical distribution of observed data. This review highlights the need and sets the stage for a rigorous multi-system modeling approach to improve our knowledge about Aedes presence/abundance within their flight range in response to the interaction between environmental, socioeconomic, and meteorological systems.