We develop an analysis of the cryptocurrency market borrowing methods and concepts from ecology. This approach makes it possible to identify specific diversity patterns and their variation, in close analogy with ecological systems, and to characterize the cryptocurrency market in an effective way. At the same time, it shows how non-biological systems can have an important role in contrasting different ecological theories and in testing the use of neutral models. The study of the cryptocurrencies abundance distribution and the evolution of the community structure strongly indicates that these statistical patterns are not consistent with neutrality. In particular, the necessity to increase the temporal change in community composition when the number of cryptocurrencies grows, suggests that their interactions are not necessarily weak. The analysis of the intraspecific and interspecific interdependency supports this fact and demonstrates the presence of a market sector influenced by mutualistic relations. These latest findings challenge the hypothesis of weakly interacting symmetric species, the postulate at the heart of neutral models.
Because a fast vaccination rollout against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is critical to restore daily life and avoid virus mutations, it is tempting to have a relaxed vaccination-administration management system. However, a rigorous management system can support the enforcement of preventive measures, and in turn, reduce incidence and deaths. Here, we model a trustable and reliable management system based on blockchain for vaccine distribution by extending the Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovery (SEIR) model. The model includes prevention measures such as mask-wearing, social distancing, vaccination rate, and vaccination efficiency. It also considers negative social behavior, such as violations of social distance and attempts of using illegitimate vaccination proofs. By evaluating the model, we show that the proposed system can reduce up to 2.5 million cases and half a million deaths in the most demanding scenarios.
Cesare Furlanello, Manlio De Domenico, Giuseppe Jurman, Nicole Bussola
Publishing reproducible analyses is a long-standing and widespread challenge for the scientific community, funding bodies and publishers. Although a definitive solution is still elusive, the problem is recognized to affect all disciplines and lead to a critical system inefficiency. Here, we propose a blockchain-based approach to enhance scientific reproducibility, with a focus on life science studies and precision medicine. While the interest of encoding permanently into an immutable ledger all the study key information-including endpoints, data and metadata, protocols, analytical methods and all findings-has been already highlighted, here we apply the blockchain approach to solve the issue of rewarding time and expertise of scientists that commit to verify reproducibility. Our mechanism builds a trustless ecosystem of researchers, funding bodies and publishers cooperating to guarantee digital and permanent access to information and reproducible results. As a natural byproduct, a procedure to quantify scientists' and institutions' reputation for ranking purposes is obtained.