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FuturICT foundations are social science, complex systems science, and ICT. The main concerns and challenges in the science of complex systems in the context of FuturICT are laid out in this paper with special emphasis on the Complex Systems route to Social Sciences. This include complex systems having: many heterogeneous interacting parts; multiple scales; complicated transition laws; unexpected or unpredicted emergence; sensitive dependence on initial conditions; path-dependent dynamics; networked hierarchical connectivities; interaction of autonomous agents; self-organisation; non-equilibrium dynamics; combinatorial explosion; adaptivity to changing environments; co-evolving subsystems; ill-defined boundaries; and multilevel dynamics. In this context, science is seen as the process of abstracting the dynamics of systems from data. This presents many challenges including: data gathering by large-scale experiment, participatory sensing and social computation, managing huge distributed dynamic and heterogeneous databases; moving from data to dynamical models, going beyond correlations to cause-effect relationships, understanding the relationship between simple and comprehensive models with appropriate choices of variables, ensemble modeling and data assimilation, modeling systems of systems of systems with many levels between micro and macro; and formulating new approaches to prediction, forecasting, and risk, especially in systems that can reflect on and change their behaviour in response to predictions, and systems whose apparently predictable behaviour is disrupted by apparently unpredictable rare or extreme events. These challenges are part of the FuturICT agenda. © The Author(s) 2012. ; The publication of this work was partially supported by the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement No. 284709, a Coordina- tionandSupportActionintheInformationandCommunicationTechnologiesactivityarea ('FuturICT' FET Flagship Pilot Project). MSM acknowledges also financial support for research on Complex Systems from MINECO FIS2007-6032. ; Peer Reviewed

Should humanity prepare for life on a less habitable planet? The magnitude of human activities indeed makes it necessary to think about their consequences and to consider tackling them with renewed imaginative foundations. From this point of view, science fiction may have the advantage of having anticipated the movement. By initiating and accumulating thought experiments, its narrative combinations offer a cognitive reservoir and a reflexive medium for interpreting the world. Science fiction, and its imaginary constructions, provide a rare representation of how 'future generations' live, act and organise themselves. Faced with the need for new intellectual resources and frameworks fuelled by the notion of the Anthropocene, this contribution will first show that imaginary productions of science fiction are also of interest as a distinctive way to represent and problematise (in the sense of Michel Foucault) the relation of thinking species to their habitat, and therefore to cast the Earth's habitability, its state and becoming as collective issues. It will then specify the intellectual operations (exploration, framing, and experimentation in particular) that can be engaged on these bases, and thus the type of participation that science fiction can offer to build an ethics of the future.

This paper proposes a model of the processes of the social construction of news by newspapers of studies reported in scientific and medical journals, through the use of embargoed access to the journals by the journalists. Substantial support for the model was found in data from a content analysis of 46,108 coverage decisions by newspapers for studies reported in four elite scholarly journals from June 1997 through May 1998. Associated Press coverage of a journal article was the principal direct influence on newspaper coverage of the journal article, with press releases and the proximity of the research having lesser direct influence.