Scientists have figured out how to make their own molecules from scratch

ETH Zurich/Lucio Isa

And the possibilities are huge.
A new technique for making artificial molecules in the lab has been developed by researchers in Switzerland, and it opens up the possibility of new micro-robots and other microscopic structures being produced for a specific task - such as delivering medicine into targeted areas in the body - in a way that closely mimics the body's natural processes.

"So far, no scientist has succeeded in fully controlling the sequence of individual components when producing artificial molecules on the micro-scale," said lead researcher, Lucio Isa from ETH Zurich.

The process to create these artificial molecules starts with microspheres made of polymer or silica - 1 micrometre in diameter - which are placed side-by-side in tiny indentations and engraved in polymer templates. The indentations set the form of the finished object and heat is then used to bond the spheres together.

The team says this new procedure is more effective than other micro-3D printing technologies because it enables scientists to build single micro-structures from multiple materials. This means they can arrange artificial molecules in the sequence and with the geometry of their choosing.

It also enables them to precisely define magnetic, non-magnetic, and differently charged areas. Small rods, tiny triangles, and basic 3D objects can be created, though the research team wants to expand the capabilities of the process further.

The researchers say the practical benefits of the process could range from

• self-propelled micro-carriers that move in an external electric field and micro-mixers for lab-on-a-chip applications, to (eventually) 
• micro-robots for biomedical applications which are able to grab, transport, and release other specific micro-objects.

They also think their new technique could be used to assemble larger 'superstructures' for use in areas such as photonics (light-based signal processing).

Thanks to the level of control the team has managed to develop, the process is extremely versatile. "In principle, our method can be adapted to any material, even metals," said Isa.

"The full programmability of our approach opens up new directions not only for assembling and studying complex materials with single-particle-level control but also for fabricating new microscale devices for sensing, patterning, and delivery applications," concludes the study, which has been published in the journal Science Advances.

ORIGINAL: Science Alert
DAVID NIELD
8 APR 2016

A DNA hard drive has been built that can store data for 1 MILLION years

Image: Philipp Stössel/ETH Zurich

Scientists have found a way to preserve the world's data for millions of years, by storing it on a tiny strand of DNA preserved in glass.

When you think of humanity’s legacy, the most powerful message for us to leave behind for future civilisations would surely be our billions of terabytes of data. But right now the hard drives and discs that we use to store all this information are frustratingly vulnerable, and unlikely to survive more than a couple of hundred years.

Fortunately scientists have built a DNA time capsule that's capable of safely preserving all of our data for more than a million years. And we’re kind of freaking out over how huge the implications are.

Researchers already knew that DNA was ideal for data storage. In theory, just 1 gram of DNA is capable of holding 455 exabytes, which is the equivalent of one billion gigabytes, and more than enough space to store all of Google, Facebook and pretty much everyone else's data.

Storing information on DNA is also surprisingly simple - researchers just need to program the A and C base pairs of DNA as a binary '0', and the T and G as a '1'. But the researchers, led by Robert Grass from ETH Zürich in Switzerland, wanted to find out just how long this data would last.

DNA can definitely be durable - in 2013 scientists managed to sequence genetic code from 700,000-year-old horse bones - but it has to be preserved in pretty specific conditions, otherwise it can change and break down as it's exposed to the environment. So Glass's team decided to try to replicate a fossil, to see if it would help them create a long-lasting DNA hard drive.

"Similar to these bones, we wanted to protect the information-bearing DNA with a synthetic 'fossil' shell," explained Grass in a press release.

In order to do that, the team encoded Switzerland’s Federal Charter of 1921 and The Methods of Mechanical Theorems by Archimedes onto a DNA strand - a total of 83 kilobytes of data. They then encapsulated the DNA into tiny glass spheres, which were around 150 nanometres in diameter.

The researchers compared these glass spheres against other packaging methods by exposing them to temperatures of between 60 and 70 degrees Celsius - conditions that replicated the chemical degradation that would usually occur over hundreds of years, all crammed into a few destructive weeks.

They found that even after this sped-up degradation process, the DNA inside the glass spheres could easily be extracted using a fluoride solution, and the data on it could still be read. In fact, these glass casings seem to work much like fossilised bones.

Based on their results, which have been published in Angewandte Chemie, the team predicts that data stored on DNA could survive over a million years if it was stored in temperatures below -18 degrees Celsius, for example, in a facility like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is also known as the ‘Doomsday Vault’. They say it could last 2,000 years if stored somewhere less secure at 10 degrees Celsius - a similar average temperature to central Europe.

The tricky part of this whole process is that the data stored in DNA needs to be read properly in order for future civilisations to be able to access it. And despite advances in sequencing technology, errors still arise from DNA sequencing.

The team overcame this by embedding a method for correcting any errors within the glass spheres, based on the Reed-Solomon Codes, which help researchers transmit data over long distances. Basically, additional information is attached to the actual data, to help people read it on the other end.

This worked so well that even after the test DNA had been kept in scorching and degrading conditions for a month, the team could still read Switzerland’s Federal Charter and Archimedes’ wise words at the end of the study.

The other major problem, which is not so easy to overcome, is the fact that storing information on DNA is still extremely expensive - it cost around US$1,500 just to encode the 83 kilobytes of data used in this study. Hopefully this cost will go down as we get better at writing information onto DNA. Researchers out there are already storing books onto DNA, and the band OK Go are also writing their new album into genetic information.

The question is, what would Grass store, now that he’s developed this mind-blowing time capsule? The documents in Unesco’s Memory of the World Programme, and… Wikipedia, he says.

“Many entries are described in detail, others less so. This probably provides a good overview of what our society knows, what occupies it and to what extent,” said Grass in the release.

It’s ridiculously cool to think that even if we do wipe ourselves off the face of the Earth, our civilisation might still live on for millennia to come in the form of Wikipedia pages and Facebook updates.

We really are (almost) infinite.

Source: New Scientist


ORIGINAL: Science Alert

FIONA MACDONALD 

17 FEB 2015

Gordon Bell Prize Bubbles from Sequoia

Each year at SC, the ACM hands out one of the most coveted awards, the Gordon Bell Prize. The award, which became a regular feature of SC, began in 1987 and now carries a $10,000 prize sponsored by parallel computing luminary, Gordon Bell. Winners demonstrate high peak performance figures on real world applications or demonstrate other performance-geared achievements, including incredible advances in scaling, time to solution of scientific applications or other feats of HPC might.

This year the Gordon Bell award, chosen because of its demonstration of a high performance application went to “11 PFLOP/s Simulations of Cloud Cavitation Collapse,” by Diego Rossinelli, Babak Hejazialhosseini, Panagiotis Hadjidoukas and Petros Koumoutsakos, all of ETH Zurich, Costas Bekas and Alessandro Curioni of IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, and Steffen Schmidt and Nikolaus Adams of Technical University Munich.

The researchers, in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich and LLNL broke some serious computational fluid dynamics ground in their simulation, which maneuvered 6.4 million threads on the IBM Sequoia system. The simulation, according to IBM, stands as the “largest simulation ever in fluid dynamics by employing 13 trillion cells and reaching an unprecedented, for flow simulations, 14.4 petaflop sustained performance on Sequoia—73% of the supercomputer’s theoretical peak.”

The bubble bursting exercises are more than just interesting to watch in action. These simulations model complex events related to clouds of collapsing bubbles, which can yield new insight in manufacturing, medicine and beyond as scientists seek to understand how they might “shatter” tumors, kidney stones or even fuel injection fluid interactions.

The researchers described their award-winning effort by pointing to how the “destructive power of cavitation reduces the lifetime of energy critical systems such as internal combustion engines and hydraulic turbines, yet it has been harnessed for water purification and kidney lithotripsy.” They go on to note that they were able to “advance by one order of magnitude the current state-of-the-art in terms of time to solution, and by two orders the geometrical complexity of the flow. The software successfully addresses the challenges that hinder the effective solution of complex flows on contemporary supercomputers, such as limited memory bandwidth, I/O bandwidth and storage capacity.”

“We were able to accomplish this using an array of pioneering hardware and software features within the IBM BlueGene/Q platform that allowed the fast development of ultra-scalable code which achieves an order of magnitude better performance than previous state-of-the-art,” said Alessandro Curioni, head of mathematical and computational sciences department at IBM Research – Zurich. “While the Top500 list will continue to generate global interest, the applications of these machines and how they are used to tackle some of the world’s most pressing human and business issues more accurately quantifies the evolution of supercomputing.”

As IBM noted, These simulations are one to two orders of magnitude faster than any previously reported flow simulation. The last major achievement was earlier this year by a team at Stanford University which broke the one million core barrier, also on Sequoia.

This year the prize committee clarified their description of what it takes to render a winner, including the following criteria:

The prize winner is not selected simply on raw performance numbers. Rather, the Prize Committee seeks:

• evidence of important algorithmic and/or implementation innovations
• clear improvement over the previous state-of-the-art
• solutions that don’t depend on one-of-a-kind architectures (systems that can only be used to address a narrow range of problems, or that can’t be replicated by others)
• performance measurements that have been characterized in terms of scalability (strong as well as weak scaling), time to solution, efficiency (in using bottleneck resources, such as memory size or bandwidth, communications bandwidth, I/O), and/or peak performance
• achievements that are generalizable, in the sense that other people can learn and benefit from the innovations

Solving an important scientific or engineering problem is important to demonstrate/justify the work, but scientific outcomes alone are not sufficient for this prize.

ORIGINAL: HPC Wire
Nicole Hemsoth
November 22, 2013

High-Concentration Photovoltaic Thermal System From IBM Promises 80% Efficiency, Potable Water, And Air Conditioning

ORIGINAL: SolarLove

Nathan

April 24, 2013

How does a cost-competitive photovoltaic system that is able to concentrate sunlight 2000 times and then capture 80% of the concentrated energy sound? Pretty good, right? Such a system is currently being developed by researchers at IBM Research, Airlight Energy, ETH Zurich, and Interstate University of Applied Sciences Buchs NTB, after winning a three-year $2.4 million grant from the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation.

Image Credit: © IBM

And in addition to generating electricity, the system can its<div style="font-size: medium; line-height: 1.5em; text-align: justify;">elf desalinate water and provide air-conditioning, useful features for the sunny and remote regions that the system is designed for.

An economical High Concentration Photovoltaic Thermal (HCPVT) system, that in addition to supplying electricity can desalinate water and provide air conditioning, is the complete package as far as many regions of the world are concerned.

The prototype system makes use of a large parabolic dish, composed of a number of mirror facets, which are coordinated to a sun tracking system. The system automatically repositions itself to the optimum angle for power generation. The sunlight that hits the mirrors is reflected off of them onto a number of microchannel-liquid cooled receivers with triple junction photovoltaic chips. Every one of these 1×1 centimeter chips “can convert 200-250 watts, on average, over a typical eight hour day in a sunny region.” And there are hundreds of these chips in the design, providing a total of about 25 kilowatts of electrical power.

The press release notes:

The photovoltaic chips are mounted on micro-structured layers that pipe liquid coolants within a few tens of micrometers off the chip to absorb the heat and draw it away 10 times more effective than with passive air cooling. The coolant maintains the chips almost at the same temperature for a solar concentration of 2,000 times and can keep them at safe temperatures up to a solar concentration of 5,000 times.

The direct cooling solution with very small pumping power is inspired by the hierarchical branched blood supply system of the human body and has been already tested by IBM scientists in high performance computers, including Aquasar. An initial demonstrator of the multi-chip receiver was developed in a previous collaboration between IBM and the Egypt Nanotechnology Research Center.

“We plan to use triple-junction photovoltaic cells on a micro-channel cooled module which can directly convert more than 30 percent of collected solar radiation into electrical energy and allow for the efficient recovery of an additional 50 percent waste heat,” said Bruno Michel , manager, advanced thermal packaging at IBM Research. “We believe that we can achieve this with a very practical design that is made of lightweight and high strength concrete, which is used in bridges, and primary optics composed of inexpensive pneumatic mirrors — it’s frugal innovation, but builds on decades of experience in microtechnology.

By utilizing such a high concentration of sunlight, and the rather low cost of the design, the researchers think that they can realize a cost per aperture area under $250 per square meter — that is roughly 3 times lower than in similar systems. According to them, “the levelized cost of energy will be less than 10 cents per kilowatt hour (KWh). For comparison, feed in tariffs for electrical energy in Germany are currently still larger than 25 cents per KWh and production cost at coal power stations are around 5-10 cents per KWh.”

One of the innovations of the new system is its collection and repurposing of the “waste heat” generated by solar thermal. By utilizing the heat instead of simply allowing it to dissipate, it becomes possible to cheaply desalinate water and provide cooling via a thermal-driven adsorption chiller, while also solving the overheating problems of solar chips.

In order to efficiently capture the waste heat, the researchers made use of an advanced technology that was already developed and in use, the water-cooling systems for very high-performance computers such as Aquasar and SuperMUC. While that heat is simply reused to provide space heating for the facilities, the captured heat in this instance will be used to heat salty water that is then distiller via vaporization. The researchers say that the system could provide up to “30-40 liters of drinkable water per square meter of receiver area per day, while still generating electricity with a more than 25 percent yield or two kilowatt hours per day.” So with a large array of these systems it would be very possible to provide enough water for a small city/town.

The system also possesses the ability to provide air conditioning, via a thermal driven adsorption chiller. “An adsorption chiller is a device that converts heat into cooling via a thermal cycle applied to an absorber made from silica gel, for example. Adsorption chillers, with water as working fluid, can replace compression chillers, which stress electrical grids in hot climates and contain working fluids that are harmful to the ozone layer.”

Researchers are currently testing a prototype of the HCPVT system at IBM Research — Zurich.

Tiny glass ‘bottles’ protect DNA from damage

ORIGINAL: BBC

Philip Ball 

1 April 2013 

(Copyright: Science Photo Library) 

Scientists have figured out how to trap DNA in microscopic shells, which could bring the idea of DNA as the ultimate data-storage medium a step closer to reality. 

Scientists have given another eloquent demonstration of how DNA could be used to archive digital data. 

In many ways, DNA could be the ultimate data-storage medium. Ever since James Watson and Francis Crick showed almost 60 years ago to the day how DNA might act as the carrier of genetic information, its status as a molecular data bank has been growing. Once the artificial synthesis of DNA by chemical methods became routine in the 1970s, it became ever more possible to write any message into the double helix, encoded in the sequences of its four-letter alphabet. The prowess of these techniques was demonstrated last year when a team at Harvard Medical School wrote a 53,000-word book (plus 11 images – 5.27 megabits of data in all) into the structure of strands of DNA.

In principle, a gram of DNA could store almost 500 billion GB – as much as 100 billion DVDs. But there’s a drawback. Like most of the molecules in living organisms, DNA is rather delicate. Its chemical structure starts to break up if it encounters acids or bases, or high temperatures, or free radicals, or the DNA-munching enzymes that all organisms carry. You only need to look at fossils to see that: ancient DNA is as corroded as old ironware, its genetic messages often chopped up or scrambled. You wouldn’t want to entrust your family snapshots to this yet.

That chemical instability is a real drag, because of what DNA offers as an information store. There are several different proposals for making DNA computers that could not just hold but also process data, possibly finding solutions to difficult computational problems much faster than current silicon computers, because billions of molecules could conduct many searches for the best solution in parallel. And DNA tags could be used for a kind of barcoding that would be almost impossible to counterfeit, and which could label individual molecules, components of cells in biotechnology and medicine, and even entire organisms (such as valuable livestock). What’s more, single-stranded DNA tags can be attached to particles and structures too small to see so that they will assemble themselves, by pairing into double helices, in pre-ordained ways dictated by their ‘genetic’ sequence – a kind of smart dust, if you will.

All this could make a method of protecting DNA from falling apart extremely useful. And that is what chemists Robert Grass, Daniela Paunescu and Roland Fuhrer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich have devised. They have figured out how to trap double-helical DNA molecules inside what is effectively a tiny glass shell, which shields them from attack from other chemicals and protects them against heat and light.

Tough to remove this label! When protected within a silica sphere, DNA can withstand high temperatures (up to 200 °C) and aggressive radical conditions. Following deprotection with HF, the DNA can be analyzed by standard biochemical methods. This DNA protection/deprotection scheme is compatible with standard polymer processing and can be used for labeling material of nonbiological origin. ORIGINAL: Wiley

Force fields

The researchers first stick their DNA molecules onto the surface of spherical particles of silica (more or less the same as common glass) just 150 millionths of a millimetre (150 nanometres) across. They attach ammonium chemical groups to the surface of the silica particles, which have a positive electrical charge that attracts the negative charges of DNA molecules, making them stick.

Then Grass and colleagues coat these microscopic DNA-decorated beads with a very thin layer of silica again, which they grow by adding a compound called tetraethoxysilane (TEOS) to the solution. Over a period of four days, the TEOS molecules gradually stick together to form a web of silica just 10 nanometres thick, encapsulating the DNA-covered beads.

Once coated with this film, the DNA is safe from chemicals that would otherwise trash it in seconds. Like glass itself, the silica is untouched even by quite strong acids and alkalis, and will resist corrosive agents such as hydrogen peroxide (basically a type of bleach). Most of the protected DNA will also survive being heated to 140C in water, which will degrade nearly all unprotected strands, and is also sheltered from the damaging effects of direct sunlight.

Scientists have given another eloquent demonstration of how DNA could be used to archive digital data. 

Getting the DNA back out again appears to be rather easy, because the silica “bottle” can be dissolved with hydrofluoric acid – one of the few reagents that will attack silica glass, but won’t harm DNA when relatively dilute. The researchers checked that the DNA released this way not only retained the same information – the same sequence – but could also be copied using the standard laboratory method for DNA amplification, called the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).

The ETH team also showed that their DNA capsules can be mixed with polymers such as PVC to make little plastic disks that could be used to barcode consumer goods. The DNA was identifiable even after the disks were briefly heated to 200C, or were stored in a warm place (at 60C) for two months.

This isn’t the first attempt to protect DNA by encapsulating it in some kind of molecular-sized container – previous efforts have, for example, hidden the DNA in forms of silica laced with tiny pores. But such efforts have previously offered protection only against big, bulky aggressors such as DNA-digesting enzymes, not small molecules such as free radicals, nor against heat. And because this new approach uses only cheap, low-tech chemical methods, it could conceivably become a standard way for giving anything from SIM cards to cars their own unique ‘genetic’ label. The ETH team are already looking for commercial applications in secure labelling for brand protection. They are even considering personalized products – one day you might be able to buy jewellery containing your own DNA, or that of your loved ones encased in pearly glass beads.

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CO2, but from where?

ORIGINAL: The Earth Story

Original paper: Nature

Nature News & Views, with summary of paper & Image: Nature

Geologists have many records that tell the story of the last glacial maximum, the time between about 20,000 and 15,000 years ago when the glaciers of the last ice age reached their peak size and started to retreat. Ice cores, sediment cores, records of plants, soil, wind-blown loess deposits, ice-rafted debris in the ocean, etc. One story told over and over is that CO2 in the atmosphere went up significantly, from about 180 ppm to 280 ppm (for comparison, we’re currently very close to 400 ppm). That CO2 pulse into the atmosphere warmed the planet and created a runaway process that melted the glaciers.

One big question has always remained though; where did this CO2 come from? We know where the CO2 pulse today is coming from; fossil fuels, but 15,000 years ago there were no coal plants.

There are only a couple sources that could supply such a burst of carbon to the atmosphere other than fossil fuels. If most of the biosphere was killed, that would do it, but that didn’t happen. The release happened over a few thousand years, so it must have been an ongoing process; it couldn’t have been cataclysms like a meteor impact or anything else remarkable.

That pretty much leaves one source of carbon, the ocean. The ocean holds a huge amount of carbon, around 50 times as much as the atmosphere. Releasing a portion of that to the atmosphere could account for the burst, but that leaves a pair of huge questions: how did it happen, and could it happen again?

To make this carbon-burst happen, the Earth somehow needs to bring carbon-rich waters from the deep ocean up to the surface. The waters at the bottom of the ocean are there because of density; the waters form in the Antarctic and the North Atlantic, where they gain density because they are cold and because the waters are somewhat salty (temperature is more important today).

Most proposals for overturning the ocean involve winds. If the location of strong winds change on the globe that could change the mixing of the ocean and alter bottom water formation, but this is difficult to prove since winds don’t leave clear records for us to interpret.

This week’s issue of Nature gives a new hypothesis, and conveniently, it can be tested in the geologic record. A group of geoscientists led by ETH in Zurich realized that as the deglaciation started, sediments throughout the mid-Atlantic region suddenly had a large pulse of opal.

Opal is a silicate phase that in the oceans commonly forms from the leftovers of diatoms. You can see some diatoms in this image; they are planktonic life forms which float in the ocean and make small (and quite lovely) shells out of silica. When they die, those shells sink, eventually becoming opal layers.

An opal layer at this horizon means that something introduced more silica to the ocean as the glaciers started to break up. That was their hint, the North Atlantic Deep Water. Waters from somewhere else must have replaced this water as the glaciers broke apart; somehow the North Atlantic deep water must have weakened or gone away.

When glaciers like the ones in Greenland today melt, they release a burst of fresh water into the ocean. That fresh water can be enough to overcome the density difference causing North Atlantic water to sink. As the glaciers receded, the freshwater pulse weakened the formation of deep water, allowing some other water to take its place. (This mechanism, of course, has been suggested previously, to the point of being featured in the highly exaggerated movie “The Day after Tomorrow”).

That other water was silica rich, coming from the continental shelves and from Antarctica. Without this North Atlantic Deep Water formation, the silica rich water penetrated everywhere into the ocean, leading to the surge of diatom growth and opal formation. When this happens, it overturns part of the ocean, allowing CO2 into the atmosphere.

That’s a mechanism for ventilating CO2 from the ocean which not only works, but also leaves a geologic record! It’s difficult to look for records of wind; it’s easy to look for sediment pulses, and in multiple places throughout the Atlantic, that opal record exists. In fact, going back through 5 different deglaciations, there is an opal layer at each one, suggesting that mixing of high-silica water into the full Atlantic is a key part of every deglaciation we have records for.

This may not be the only part of the story for the CO2 burst; this process cannot start the CO2 rise, only amplify it. But, the presence of this silica layer is strong evidence that the normal, silica-poor deep waters went missing, and those waters are generated in the North Atlantic.

That mechanism has relevance for today as well, since there is a large glacial body still sitting in the North Atlantic, and since there is a lot of CO2 currently locked in the ocean. If weakening the formation of North Atlantic Deep Water leads to increased ocean ventilation, then meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet could be enough to cause additional release of oceanic CO2, which is scary in terms of runaway warming processes.

'Networked Minds' Require Fundamentally New Kind of Economics

ORIGINAL: ScienceDaily

Mar. 20, 2013 — In their computer simulations of human evolution, scientists at ETH Zurich find the emergence of the “homo socialis” with “other-regarding” preferences. The results explain some intriguing findings in experimental economics and call for a new economic theory of “networked minds”.

In their computer simulations of human evolution, scientists at ETH Zurich find the emergence of the “homo socialis” with “other-regarding” preferences. The results explain some intriguing findings in experimental economics and call for a new economic theory of “networked minds”. (Credit: © violetkaipa / Fotolia)

Economics has a beautiful body of theory. But does it describe real markets? Doubts have come up not only in the wake of the financial crisis, since financial crashes should not occur according to the then established theories. Since ages, economic theory is based on concepts such as efficient markets and the “homo economicus”, i.e. the assumption of competitively optimizing individuals and firms. It was believed that any behavior deviating from this would create disadvantages and, hence, be eliminated by natural selection. But experimental evidence from behavioral economics show that, on average, people behave more fairness-oriented and other-regarding than expected. A new theory by scientists from ETH Zurich now explains why. 

“We have simulated interactions of individuals facing social dilemma situations, where it would be favorable for everyone to cooperate, but non-cooperative behavior is tempting,” explains Dr. Thomas Grund, one of the authors of the study. “Hence, cooperation tends to erode, which is bad for everyone.” This may create tragedies of the commons such as over-fishing, environmental pollution, or tax evasion.

Evolution of “friendliness”

Prof. Dirk Helbing of ETH Zurich, who coordinated the study, adds: “Compared to conventional models for the evolution of social cooperation, we have distinguished between the actual behavior – cooperation or not – and an inherited character trait, describing the degree of other-regarding preferences, which we call the friendliness.” The actual behavior considers not only the own advantage (“payoff”), but also gives a weight to the payoff of the interaction partners depending on the individual friendliness. For the “homo economicus”, the weight is zero. The friendliness spreads from one generation to the next according to natural selection. This is merely based on the own payoff, but mutations happen.

For most parameter combinations, the model predicts the evolution of a payoff-maximizing “homo economicus” with selfish preferences, as assumed by a great share of the economic literature. Very surprisingly, however, biological selection may create a “homo socialis” with other-regarding preferences, namely if offsprings tend to stay close to their parents. In such a case, clusters of friendly people, who are “conditionally cooperative”, may evolve over time.

If an unconditionally cooperative individual is born by chance, it may be exploited by everyone and not leave any offspring. However, if born in a favorable, conditionally cooperative environment, it may trigger cascade-like transitions to cooperative behavior, such that other-regarding behavior pays off. Consequently, a “homo socialis” spreads.

Networked minds create a cooperative human species

“This has fundamental implications for the way, economic theories should look like,” underlines Professor Helbing. Most of today’s economic knowledge is for the “homo economicus”, but people wonder whether that theory really applies. A comparable body of work for the “homo socialis” still needs to be written.

While the “homo economicus” optimizes its utility independently, the “homo socialis” puts himself or herself into the shoes of others to consider their interests as well,” explains Grund, and Helbing adds: “This establishes something like “networked minds”. Everyone’s decisions depend on the preferences of others.” This becomes even more important in our networked world.

A participatory kind of economy

How will this change our economy? Today, many customers doubt that they get the best service by people who are driven by their own profits and bonuses. “Our theory predicts that the level of other-regarding preferences is distributed broadly, from selfish to altruistic. Academic education in economics has largely promoted the selfish type. Perhaps, our economic thinking needs to fundamentally change, and our economy should be run by different kinds of people,” suggests Grund. “The true capitalist has other-regarding preferences,” adds Helbing, “as the “homo socialis” earns much more payoff.” This is, because the “homo socialis” manages to overcome the downwards spiral that tends to drive the “homo economicus” towards tragedies of the commons. The breakdown of trust and cooperation in the financial markets back in 2008 might be seen as good example.

“Social media will promote a new kind of participatory economy, in which competition goes hand in hand with cooperation,” believes Helbing. Indeed, the digital economy’s paradigm of the “prosumer” states that the Internet, social platforms, 3D printers and other developments will enable the co-producing consumer. “It will be hard to tell who is consumer and who is producer”, says Christian Waloszek. “You might be both at the same time, and this creates a much more cooperative perspective.”