The quest for historically impactful science and technology provides invaluable insight into the innovation dynamics of human society, yet many studies are limited to qualitative and small-scale approaches. Here, we investigate scientific evolution t
hrough systematic analysis of a massive corpus of digitized English texts between 1800 and 2008. Our analysis reveals great predictability for long-prevailing scientific concepts based on the levels of their prior usage. Interestingly, once a threshold of early adoption rates is passed even slightly, scientific concepts can exhibit sudden leaps in their eventual lifetimes. We developed a mechanistic model to account for such results, indicating that slowly-but-commonly adopted science and technology surprisingly tend to have higher innate strength than fast-and-commonly adopted ones. The model prediction for disciplines other than science was also well verified. Our approach sheds light on unbiased and quantitative analysis of scientific evolution in society, and may provide a useful basis for policy-making.
Glycosylation is a highly complex process to produce a diverse repertoire of cellular glycans that are attached to proteins and lipids. Glycans are involved in fundamental biological processes, including protein folding and clearance, cell proliferat
ion and apoptosis, development, immune responses, and pathogenesis. One of the major types of glycans, N-linked glycans, is formed by sequential attachments of monosaccharides to proteins by a limited number of enzymes. Many of these enzymes can accept multiple N-linked glycans as substrates, thereby generating a large number of glycan intermediates and their intermingled pathways. Motivated by the quantitative methods developed in complex network research, we investigated the large-scale organization of such N-linked glycosylation pathways in mammalian cells. The N-linked glycosylation pathways are extremely modular, and are composed of cohesive topological modules that directly branch from a common upstream pathway of glycan synthesis. This unique structural property allows the glycan production between modules to be controlled by the upstream region. Although the enzymes act on multiple glycan substrates, indicating cross-talk between modules, the impact of the cross-talk on the module-specific enhancement of glycan synthesis may be confined within a moderate range by transcription-level control. The findings of the present study provide experimentally-testable predictions for glycosylation processes, and may be applicable to therapeutic glycoprotein engineering.
We investigated the topological properties of stock networks through a comparison of the original stock network with the estimated stock network from the correlation matrix created by the random matrix theory (RMT). We used individual stocks traded o
n the market indices of Korea, Japan, Canada, the USA, Italy, and the UK. The results are as follows. As the correlation matrix reflects the more eigenvalue property, the estimated stock network from the correlation matrix gradually increases the degree of consistency with the original stock network. Each stock with a different number of links to other stocks in the original stock network shows a different response. In particular, the largest eigenvalue is a significant deterministic factor in terms of the formation of a stock network.
