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We illustrate shape mode analysis as a simple, yet powerful technique to concisely describe complex biological shapes and their dynamics. We characterize undulatory bending waves of beating flagella and reconstruct a limit cycle of…
Reorientation (turning in plane) plays a critical role for all robots in any field application, especially those that in confined spaces. While important, reorientation remains a relatively unstudied problem for robots, including limbless…
To study how mental object representations are related to behavior, we estimated sparse, non-negative representations of objects using human behavioral judgments on images representative of 1,854 object categories. These representations…
The concept of feature selectivity in sensory signal processing can be formalized as dimensionality reduction: in a stimulus space of very high dimensions, neurons respond only to variations within some smaller, relevant subspace. But if…
Microorganisms, such as bacteria and microalgae, often live in habitats consisting of a liquid phase and a plethora of interfaces. The precise ways in which these motile microbes behave in their confined environment remain unclear. Using…
The brain is one of the most studied and highly complex systems in the biological world. It is the information center behind all vertebrate and most invertebrate life, and thus has become a major focus in current research. While many of…
In the fluid dynamics video, we present a microfluidic device to measure the propulsive power of nematodes. The device consists of a tapered conduit filled with aqueous solution. The conduit is subjected to a DC electric field with the…
Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…
We investigate a class of continuum models for the motion of a two-dimensional biological group under the influence of nonlocal social interactions. The dynamics may be uniquely decomposed into incompressible motion and potential motion.…
Much of our understanding of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms derives from analysis of low-dimensional models: with few interacting species, or few axes defining "fitness". It is not always clear to what extent the intuition derived…
Animals must constantly make decisions on the move, such as when choosing among multiple options, or "targets", in space. Recent evidence suggests that this results from a recursive feedback between the (vectorial) neural representation of…
Biological systems are robust to perturbations at both the genetic and environmental levels. Yet, these same perturbations can elicit variation in behavior. The interplay between functional robustness and behavioral variability is…
We extend the use of Configurational Information Measures (CIMSs) to instantons and vacuum decay in arbitrary spatial dimensions. We find that both the complexity and the information content in the shape of instanton solutions have distinct…
The effects of fluid elasticity on the swimming behavior of the nematode \emph{Caenorhabditis elegans} are experimentally investigated by tracking the nematode's motion and measuring the corresponding velocity fields. We find that fluid…
We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…
The newly discovered Wormhole C--metric is a solution of Einstein's field equation coupled with a phantom scalar field which describes the accelerated wormholes. In the zero acceleration limit the solution reduces to an asymptotically flat…
Elongate limbless robots have the potential to locomote through tightly packed spaces for applications such as search-and-rescue and industrial inspections. The capability to effectively and robustly maneuver elongate limbless robots is…
Many microorganisms live and evolve in complex fluids. Examples include mammalian spermatozoa in cervical mucus, worms (e.g., \textit{C. elegans}) in wet soil, and bacteria (e.g., \textit{H. pylori}) in our stomach lining. Due to the…
To establish the relationship between locomotory behavior and dynamics of neural circuits in the nematode C. elegans we combined molecular and theoretical approaches. In particular, we quantitatively analyzed the motion of C. elegans with…
Learning shared structure across environments facilitates rapid learning and adaptive behavior in neural systems. This has been widely demonstrated and applied in machine learning to train models that are capable of generalizing to novel…