Is there an invisible tug-of-war behind bad hearts and power outages? (Princeton University)

(Source: Princeton University) Is there an invisible tug-of-war behind bad hearts and power outages? Posted June 17, 2013; 10:30 a.m. by Morgan Kelly, Office of Communications Systems such as a beating heart or a power grid that depend on the synchronized movement of their parts could fall prey to an invisible and chaotic tug-of-war known as a "chimera." Sharing its name with the fire-breathing, zoologically patchy creature of Greek mythology, a chimera state arises among identical, rhythmically moving components - known as oscillators - when a few of those parts spontaneously fall out of sync while the rest remain synchronized. Whether chimera states exist in the real world has...