Growing external pressures from human activities and climate change can exacerbate desertification, compromising the livelihoods of more than 25% world’s population. The dryland mosaic is defined by land covers that do not behave similarly, identification their recurring or irregular changes over time crucial, especially in areas susceptible to become desertified. To this aim, methodological ap...

The dynamics of noise-resilient Boolean networks with majority functions and diverse topologies is investigated. A wide class of possible topological configurations is parametrized as a stochastic blockmodel. For this class of networks, the dynamics always undergoes a phase transition from a non-ergodic regime, where a memory of its past states is preserved, to an ergodic regime, where no such ...

If computer systems are to be designed to foster resilient performance it is important to be able to identify contributors to resilience. The emerging practice of Resilience Engineering has identified that people are still a primary source of resilience, and that the design of distributed systems should provide ways of helping people and organisations to cope with complexity. Although resilienc...

Two main questions are important for understanding and treating affective disorders: why are certain individuals susceptible or resilient to stress, and what are the features of treatment response and resistance? To address these questions, we used a chronic mild stress (CMS) rat model of depression. When exposed to stress, a fraction of rats develops anhedonic-like behavior, a core symptom of ...

Humans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are deficient at extinguishing conditioned fear responses. A study of identical twins concluded that this extinction deficit does not predate trauma but develops as a result of trauma. The present study tested whether the Lewis rat model of PTSD reproduces these features of the human syndrome. Lewis rats were subjected to classical auditory fear...