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The emergence of large-scale connectivity and synchronization are crucial to the structure, function and failure of many complex socio-technical networks. Thus, there is great interest in analyzing phase transitions to large-scale connectivity and to global synchronization, including how to enhance or delay the onset. These phenomena are traditionally studied as second-order phase transitions where, at the critical threshold, the order parameter increases rapidly but continuously. In 2009, an extremely abrupt transition was found for a network growth process where links compete for addition in an attempt to delay percolation. This observation of ‘explosive percolation’ was ultimately revealed to be a continuous transition in the thermodynamic limit, yet with very atypical finite-size scaling, and it started a surge of work on explosive phenomena and their consequences. Many related models are now shown to yield …