by R&D News
Northwestern University researchers are the first to discover that very different complex networks—ranging from global air traffic to neural networks—share very similar backbones. By stripping each network down to its essential nodes and links, they found each network possesses a skeleton and these skeletons share common features, much like vertebrates do. Mammals have evolved to look very different despite a common underlying structure (think of a human being and a bat), and now it appears real-world complex networks evolve in a similar way. The researchers studied a variety of biological, technological and social networks and found that all these networks have evolved according to basic growth mechanisms. The findings could be particularly useful in understanding how something—a disease, a rumor or information—spreads across a network. This surprising discovery—that networks all have skeletons and that they are similar—was published last week by the journal Nature Communications.
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