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COVID-19 is a wicked problem for policy makers internationally as the complexity of the pandemic transcends health, environment, social and economic boundaries. Many countries are focusing on two key responses, namely virus containment and financial measures, but fail to recognise other aspects. The systems approach, however, enables policy makers to design the most effective strategies and reduce the unintended consequences. To achieve fundamental change, it is imperative to firstly identify the "right" interventions (leverage points) and implement additional measures to reduce negative consequences. To do so, a preliminary causal loop diagram of the COVID-19 pandemic was designed to explore its influence on socio-economic systems. In order to transcend the "wait and see" approach, and create an adaptive and resilient system, governments need to consider "deep" leverage points that can be realistically maintained over the long-term and cause a fundamental change, rather than focusing on "shallow" leverage points that are relatively easy to implement but do not result in significant systemic change

Normally, causal influence is assumed to go only one way-from cause to effect-and never back from the effect to the cause-the ringing of a bell does not cause the pressing of the button that triggered it. Now, researchers from the University of Oxford and the Université libre de Bruxelles have developed a theory of causality in quantum theory, according to which cause-effect relations can sometimes form cycles. This theory offers a novel understanding of exotic processes in which events do not have a definite causal order. The study has been published in Nature Communications.

In the flagship article, The ENCODE Project Consortium et al.5 provide a bird's-eye view of the updated encyclopedia, which contains newly added data sets from 6,000 experiments, performed on around 1,300 samples. By integrating these data sets, the consortium has created an online registry of candidate CREs. Most are classified as promoters or enhancers - CREs respectively located at or some distance from the genomic site at which transcription of a gene begins. The consortium tracked the activity of each candidate CRE, along with the proteins that bind to it in many different samples from various tissues. They used chromatin-looping data to link enhancers to genes that they might regulate. This online registry marks a true milestone, turning an overwhelming amount of genomic information into a searchable, filterable and retrievable encyclopedia of DNA elements, which is freely accessible at https://screen.encodeproject.org.

You probably interact with fifty to a hundred machine learning products every day, from your social media feeds and YouTube recommendations to your email spam filter and the updates that the New York Times, CNN, or Fox News decide to push, not to mention the hidden models that place ads on the websites you visit, and that redesign your 'experience' on the fly. Not all models are created equal, however: they operate on different principles, and impact us as individuals and communities in different ways. They differ fundamentally from each other along dimensions such as alignment of incentives between stakeholders, "creep factor", and the nature of how their feedback loops ope !L