Human collective behavior can vary from calm to panicked depending on social context. Using videos publicly available online, we study the highly energized collective motion of attendees at heavy metal concerts. We find these extreme social gatherings generate similarly extreme behaviors: a disordered gaslike state called a mosh pit and an ordered vortexlike state called a circle pit. Both phenomena are reproduced in flocking simulations demonstrating that human collective behavior is consistent with the predictions of simplified models. © 2013 American Physical Society.

We present a unified theory of fracture in disordered brittle media that reconciles apparently conflicting results reported in the literature. Our renormalization group based approach yields a phase diagram in which the percolation fixed point, expected for infinite disorder, is unstable for finite disorder and flows to a zero-disorder nucleation-type fixed point, thus showing that fracture has a mixed first order and continuous character. In a region of intermediate disorder and finite system sizes, we predict a crossover with mean-field avalanche scaling.

We study the statistical properties of melanoma cell colonies grown in vitro by analyzing the results of crystal violet assays at different concentrations of initial plated cells and for different growth times. The distribution of colony sizes is described well by a continuous time branching process. To characterize the shape fluctuations of the colonies, we compute the distribution of eccentricities.

When pure water is cooled at ∼106 K/s, it forms an amorphous solid (glass) instead of the more familiar crystalline phase. The presence of solutes can reduce this required (or "critical") cooling rate by orders of magnitude. Here, we present critical cooling rates for a variety of solutes as a function of concentration and a theoretical framework for understanding these rates. For all solutes tested, the critical cooling rate is an exponential function of concentration. The exponential's characteristic concentration for each solute correlates with the solute's Stokes radius.

When external stresses in a system-physical, social or virtual-are relieved through impulsive events, it is natural to focus on the attributes of these avalanches. However, during the quiescent periods between them, stresses may be relieved through competing processes, such as slowly flowing water between earthquakes or thermally activated dislocation flow between plastic bursts in crystals. Such smooth responses can in turn have marked effects on the avalanche properties.

Recent experiments suggest that membranes of living cells are tuned close to a miscibility critical point in the two-dimensional Ising universality class. We propose that one role for this proximity to criticality in live cells is to provide a conduit for relatively long-range critical Casimir forces. Using techniques from conformal field theory we calculate potentials of mean force between membrane bound inclusions mediated by their local interactions with the composition order parameter.

We use an extension of the van der Pol oscillator as an example of a system with multiple time scales to study the susceptibility of its trajectory to polynomial perturbations in the dynamics. A striking feature of many nonlinear, multiparameter models is an apparently inherent insensitivity to large-magnitude variations in certain linear combinations of parameters. This phenomenon of "sloppiness" is quantified by calculating the eigenvalues of the Hessian matrix of the least-squares cost function. These typically span many orders of magnitude.

We study the asymptotic properties of fracture strength distributions of disordered elastic media by a combination of renormalization group, extreme value theory, and numerical simulation. We investigate the validity of the "weakest-link hypothesis" in the presence of realistic long-ranged interactions in the random fuse model. Numerical simulations indicate that the fracture strength is well-described by the Duxbury-Leath-Beale (DLB) distribution which is shown to flow asymptotically to the Gumbel distribution.

Tumors are defined by their intense proliferation, but sometimes cancer cells turn senescent and stop replicating. In the stochastic cancer model in which all cells are tumorigenic, senescence is seen as the result of random mutations, suggesting that it could represent a barrier to tumor growth. In the hierarchical cancer model a subset of the cells, the cancer stem cells, divide indefinitely while other cells eventually turn senescent. Here we formulate cancer growth in mathematical terms and obtain predictions for the evolution of senescence.

Intriguing analogies were found between a model of plastic deformation in crystals and turbulence in fluids. A study of this model provides remarkable explanations of known experiments and predicts fractal dislocation pattern formation. Further, the challenges encountered resemble those in turbulence, which is exemplified in a comparison with the Rayleigh-Taylor instability. © 2012 IEEE.