Earth Observation technologies are becoming increasingly valuable for understanding our changing world. They are also critical for formulating policies to protect ecosystems and support local communities. The availability of imagery taken from satellites, airplanes, and drones offers opportunities to detect deforestation, glacier melting, crop productivity, hurricane alerts, ocean temperatures, and much more. These applications have become wide-spread and are commonly featured in the news and on social media; an informed public can now be acutely aware of the significant effects that humans have on the landscape. However, other processes of land use change are too complex to be detected and understood solely from space. For example, detecting rich minerals, tracking illicit land activities (e.g., coca farming), and monitoring water salinity. For these and other complex land changes, the imagery itself might not be enough to understand the processes shaping these changes in the landscape. New ways of addressing these are needed. About 26 years ago, Jacqueline Geoghegan and her co authors wrote a chapter in the book People and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science, titled “Socializing the Pixel and Pixelizing the Social in Land-Use and Land-Cover Change.” This chapter was a pioneering step forward in extracting more information from images and linking them with the social processes behind them. It helped me during my PhD studies and subsequent research to develop a strategy for connecting quantitative data from pixels with social mechanisms that impact land change. But how do these two approaches work together? The full Interdialogue with Paulo Murillo. The role of classification in traditional land use science relies on how effectively we can classify elements on the land surface. Classification is the most relevant task in remote sensing. We want to classify or differentiate between forests and agricultural fields or among diverse types of crops using...

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...

Why life is complex and — most importantly — what is the origin of the over abundance of complexity in nature? This is a fundamental scientific question which, paraphrasing the late Per Bak, “is screaming to be answered but seldom is even being asked.” In this three-article series, we review recent attempts across several scales to understand the origins of complex biological problems from the perspective of critical phenomena. Following a broad introduction to complexity, criticality and universality in Part 1, to illustrate the approach, three cases will be discussed in Parts 2 and 3; large scale brain dynamics, the characterization of spontaneous fluctuations of proteins, and the physiological complexity of the cell mitochondria network. Introduction In the last decade, we have witnessed an escalating interest in complex biological phenomena at all levels including macroevolution, neuroscience at different scales, and molecular biology. Potential progress is of paramount importance, thus we shall examine a bit how we are currently proceeding to carve out these new areas, starting with asking whether biological phenomena are more or less complex than other fundamental problems in physics. The answer is not clear at first, however striking differences exist in the approaches as well as in the sociology of both fields.  The history of physics records many important efforts in search for universality; large classes of phenomena must be explained in terms of a few fundamental laws. In contrast, biology more often seems to emphasize unique and singular aspects; because not all organisms are alike, there is a large diversity of species, families, etc… such that taxonomy ends up prevailing over integration of knowledge. This apparent uniqueness of each biological phenomena in some cases leads to overspecialization, which may, from time to time, encourage the creation of a sub-discipline for each new group of complex biological...

In a complex and rapidly evolving technological, socio-economic and geopolitical landscape that is focused on a global “sustainable energy transition,” increased electromobility based on lithium batteries is often stated as a key objective. However, unbeknownst to the public, policy makers and most researchers alike, lithium in its enriched isotopic forms (6Li and 7Li) holds tremendous added value beyond its use in batteries. This is especially true in both present and future nuclear technologies. For those countries with large lithium reserves that are being prospected for rapid lithium exploitation in order to fuel the growing global electromobility sector, it is important to be aware of these added value uses when considering plans for expanding lithium extraction (plans that also hold negative environmental externalities, such as prodigious water use and contamination). Argentina – which has an established nuclear energy and research sector, as well as a current administration that seems committed to rapidly depleting the national lithium reserves – serves as a strong and dynamic case study for the importance of crafting long-term, science-based and sustainable policies around the exploitation and isotopic separation of lithium. Argentina owns almost a third of the lithium reserves in South America which, together with those of Chile and Bolivia, represent more than half of the world’s lithium availability. Battery-grade lithium carbonate (Li2CO3) is produced from the Puna brines in the Andes of Northwestern Argentina – it is exported and only a small fraction remains in Argentina as royalties (around 3%) and the declared profits of the mining companies.  This article analyzes the use of lithium isotopes (6Li and 7Li) in fission and fusion nuclear reactors and in nuclear technology devices, such as scintillation plates, neutron detectors and shields. These uses of lithium in nuclear technologies have the potential to add value to Argentina’s limited lithium reserves...