Is there an invisible tug-of-war behind bad hearts and power outages?

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.

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