Jordi Soriano Fradera is a Spanish physicist and Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Barcelona, where he leads the Neurophysics Group and serves as vice-director of the university’s Institute of Complex Systems (UBICS). He earned his PhD in condensed matter physics at the University of Barcelona before completing postdoctoral research in developmental biology in Germany and in neuroscience at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. For more than fifteen years, his group has developed in vitro neuronal cultures and biophysical models to study how connectivity and collective dynamics give rise to brain function, and how they break down in neurological disease. He has collaborated closely with medical teams on Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Sanfilippo, and Alzheimer’s disease, and coordinated research under the EU Horizon 2020 NEU-CHiP project on biological computing. In this InterDialogue, recorded in Soriano’s lab among live neuronal cultures and imaging equipment, we trace his path from studying fluid fronts in porous media as a condensed matter physicist to a twenty-year career in neurophysics. We discuss how his group engineers rat and human stem-cell-derived neuronal cultures to model the brain’s structural and functional connectivity and to serve as disease models for Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Sanfilippo, and Alzheimer’s, the prospects and limits of cell transplantation and personalized medicine, and why Soriano estimates a twenty-year horizon before such approaches reach the clinic. We also discuss his work on network damage, resilience, and criticality in neuronal cultures, the NEU-CHiP project’s attempt to train living neurons to perform computation, neuromorphic chips that mimic neurons in silicon, and a striking experiment in which donated human brain tissue was made to play back a melody fed to it through a robotic piano. We close by considering the ethical stakes of coupling neuronal cultures with robots and augmented-human technologies, Soriano’s efforts to help build neuroscience...

In this guest InterDialogue, folklorist and InterPlex content and operations strategist Rowan Glass converses with K. Brandon Barker, Associate Professor of Folklore at Indiana University Bloomington and editor of Children’s Folklore Review. Barker co-authored the book Folk Illusions with Claiborne Rice, introducing the term “folk illusions” to study children’s play forms in relation to the science of perception and cognition. He has also written on animal cognition and the folklore of science with comparative psychologist Daniel Povinelli, with whom he co-edited the book The Aesop’s Fable Paradigm. For several years, Barker led the Folklore and Science Section of the American Folklore Society, which he helped found. The conversation begins with two notoriously murky words: how to define both folklore and science when both terms carry so much baggage? Barker makes the case that “the folk” are far less naive than some scientists assume, and that folklore’s ethnographic methods can offer insights into problems like vaccine hesitancy and misinformation by taking seriously perspectives often overlooked by or inaccessible to scholars in other fields. Glass then addresses Barker’s research on folk illusions and what children’s play reveals about adultcentrism, body acquisition, and the science of perception. They probe the epistemological stakes of folklore scholarship in relation to the natural sciences, asking whether folklorists can or should advance universal claims and broad theoretical frameworks. They also talk about computation folklore and Barker’s work on the folklore of animal cognition. The conversation then turns toward humans’ seemingly inherent tendencies toward anthropomorphism and human exceptionalism—whether applied to animals or artificial intelligence. Barker asserts that our seemingly inherent penchant for projecting human qualities onto the non-human world might be more powerful, and perhaps more dangerous, than we realize. Timestamps 0:00 – Introduction 2:22 – Defining folklore 4:14 – Defining science and the “folk as naive” blind...

Ciro Cattuto is an Italian physicist and complexity scientist whose work explores the intricate relationships between human behavior and digital technologies. Since 2008, he has served as Scientific Director of the ISI Foundation, based in Turin, Italy. He is also the founder and principal investigator of the Sociopatterns Collaboration. Throughout his career, Cattuto has held a range of influential research, fellowship, advisory, and board positions in Italy, the United States, and Japan. In this thought-provoking InterDialogue, we trace Cattuto’s intellectual journey from theoretical solid-state physics into complex systems science, a multicultural path that unfolded across three continents. We also discuss his contributions to data science and complex network research, including his work on some of the first digital social networks. We then examine what it means to conduct interdisciplinary research and how such collaborations can be cultivated more effectively. Cattuto also draws on his experience at the intersection of complex networks and epidemiology as a case of interdisciplinary bridge-building in practice. We further discuss the research priorities and guiding principles of the ISI Foundation, especially in relation to its current focus on computational social science and opportunities for policy impact. Finally, we reflect on both the promise and the profound challenges associated with the growing integration of artificial intelligence into scientific research and society more broadly. Timestamps 1:41 – Cattuto’s background and trajectory in complex systems science 9:19 – ISI as a hub of European complex systems science 11:46 – Interdisciplinary collaborations at ISI 14:38 – Interdisciplinarity and institutional funding frameworks 16:52 – Interdisciplinarity across generational, disciplinary, and national boundaries 19:36 – Computational social science and other interdisciplinary research areas at ISI 24:06 – Translating research into policy and governance 25:26 – Social science contributions to AI and computational research 27:36 – Studying complex systems using AI 29:59 – Challenges...

Investment in science is a pillar for any dynamic, equitable modern society, and promoting scientific literacy across all levels of society can help foster innovation, dialogue, and consensus that crosses disciplinary and cultural boundaries. Science also helps to uncover answers to foundational questions that have captivated, confounded, and divided our species for millennia. But what is “science,” and what kind of “evidence” ensures that an approach is scientific? If we take “science” to broadly mean, in its purest sense, a “dynamic search for the truth,” or more explicitly, “the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence,” as the Science Council aptly defines it, then science extends beyond the established, highly specialized disciplines of reductionist natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, geoscience, and space science) that have been so successful in fostering our understanding of our planet and the cosmos. Under this definition, science also includes the rigorous data-driven (qualitative and quantitative) social sciences, the inherently non-reductionist “holistic” sciences such as ecological and Earth system sciences, and the budding interdisciplinary field of complex systems science, as well as robust traditional knowledge systems based on multi-generational experiences, observations, and reasoning. As with science, “evidence” can mean a lot of things as well, including primary research, pre-existing data, past and planned experiments, and the referencing of peer-reviewed publications and primary sources. It can also include local and traditional knowledge, thought experiments, theoretical proofs, contemplation, verifiable personal experience, and empirical observation. Broadening and weaving together these forms of scientific evidence holds the potential to address complex, interconnected global challenges and explain deep mysteries that could help unify our polarized societies around foundational understandings. Foundational Questions Foundational questions can transcend the divides of generations and cultures: Cosmology, physics, and evolutionary biology have shed...

In this InterDialogue, Spanish physicist and complex systems theorist Jesús Gómez-Gardeñes speaks with The InterPlex founder Daniel Henryk Rasolt about a wide range of topics, beginning with a discussion of LANET, the Latin American Conference on Complex Networks, which he helped found. Jesús Gómez-Gardeñes is a Full Professor in the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Zaragoza in Spain, where he leads the Group of Theoretical & Applied Modeling (GOTHAM lab) at the BIFI Institute. Professor Gómez-Gardeñes has led a varied and impactful career. His research has explored topics such as collective behavior, nonlinear dynamics, evolutionary dynamics, epidemics, and theoretical biology, all from the standpoint of complex systems and network theory. He is currently organizing the 2026 CompleNet conference, to be held in Zaragoza from May 4 to 8. This dialogue ranges from Gómez-Gardeñes’s experiences as a thought leader in complex network sciences in Europe and Latin America to his work on epidemics, urban mobility, and metapopulation networks. He also touches on confronting anti-science rhetoric and the need for scientists to address misinformation by establishing effective links with the media and policymakers. The discussion concludes with an assessment of the complexity inherent to Colombia, a nation that Gómez-Gardeñes has spent much time working in, and a view toward his current and future projects. Timestamps 0:00 – Introduction 4:32 – How LANET Was Founded 8:23 – International Academic Exchange between Colombia and Europe 11:28 – The Role of Complex Networks in Interdisciplinary Collaborations 14:19 – Networking and Collaborating Through Conferences 17:17 – Building Local Capacity and Fostering International Collaborations 23:21 – Expanding Reach and Accessibility, Hybrid Courses 26:37 – Gómez-Gardeñes’s Research on Epidemics 32:33 – Metapopulation Networks 36:08 – Pivoting From Urban Mobility Research to Epidemics 41:10 – Mosquitoes as Vectors 47:03 – Socio-Behavioral Factors and Epidemic Forecasting...

Editor’s Note: This semi-technical review article is republished with exclusive permission from The Royal Society Press. It was originally published to the peer-reviewed journal Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society A. This article has a target audience of researchers and experts in diverse disciplines, though to make the content more understandable and engaging for a wider audience, we have broken apart the pdf version of the article into five parts and interspersed audio clips from Constantino Tsallis on relevant topics being discussed in the article. Explore our full InterDialogue with Professor Tsallis to learn more about the development and interdisciplinary applications of his innovative generalized theory of non-additive “Tsallis” entropy and q-statistics. Listen to Tsallis explain about his diverse cultural background and the early development of non-additive entropy. Explore the full InterDialogue with Constantino Tsallis Listen to Tsallis speak about the early presentations, recognitions and interdisciplinary applications of non-additive entropy, the beginning of his collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann, his entrance into the burgeoning field of complex systems and his founding of the National Institute of Science and Technology for Complex Systems (INCT-SC) in Brazil. Explore the full InterDialogue with Constantino Tsallis Listen to Tsallis explain about some of the very broad interdisciplinary applications and collaborations that have been fostered by non-additive entropy and q-statistics, and why he thinks this is possible, from neuroscience and childhood development, to economics to foundational questions of biogenesis and cosmology, all existing “at the edge of chaos.” Explore the full InterDialogue with Constantino Tsallis Listen to Tsallis explain about how non-additive entropy and q-statistics have been observed in medical imaging and the applications for human health, from neuroimaging in children to electrocardiograms in adults. Explore the full InterDialogue with Constantino Tsallis Banner image: Mandelbrot set. The edge of the Mandelbrot set represents the line between...