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Figure 6.15.
The United States power-transmission grid consists of 300,000 km of lines operated by 500
companies. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission.
Figure 6.16. Caenorhabditis elegans is a free-living, transparent nematode (round-worm), about 1mm in
length, which lives in temperate soil environments. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Caenorhabditis_elegans.
67. Of course, we learned in Chapter 2
that blackouts have a size-frequency distribution that is an inverse power law.
(c) C. elegans . The final exemplar is a biological web, Caenorhabditis elegans ,aworm.
In the wild this worm feeds on bacteria that develop on decaying vegetable matter
(see Figure 6.16 ). C. elegans is the most primitive organism that exists that shares
many of the biological characteristics of mammals. The nervous system of C. ele-
gans is quite remarkable, having about 300 neurons and 4,000 connections. Because
of its small size this worm is often used to simplify the analysis of such entities as a
mouse brain. WS found that the total number of nodes is N
to have an average connectivity of
k
=
2
.
=
282, and the average
connectivity is
14. Research into the molecular and developmental biology
of C. elegans was begun in 1974 by Sydney Brenner and it has since been used
extensively as a model organism.
k
=
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