Coverage on Gizmodo:
"Predicting when a complex system will go through a sudden change is hard — either you need vast swathes of information, or you make rather bad predictions. But we want to spot critical transitions before they happen, regardless of whether we're talking about irreversible damage to coral reefs, stock market crashes, or fishery collapses. It can be done if you know what to look for, but getting a sufficient amount of data be tough.
Enter a new proposal by Steven Lade from the Max-Planck-Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany and Thilo Gross from the University of Bristol published yesterday in the journal PLoS Computational Biology (free online)..."
More here: (link)