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Although typically possessing four limbs and short bodies, lizards have evolved a diversity of body plans, from short-bodied and fully-limbed to elongate and nearly limbless. Such diversity in body morphology is hypothesized as adaptations…
Recently, long and slender living worms have garnered significant interest because of their impressive ability to exhibit diverse emergent behaviors in highly entangled physical and topological conditions. These worms can form an active…
We introduce a generic, purely mechanical model for environment sensitive motion of mammalian cells that is applicable to chemotaxis, haptotaxis, and durotaxis as modes of motility. It is able to theoretically explain all relevant…
The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…
Individual Neurons in the nervous systems exploit various dynamics. To capture these dynamics for single neurons, we tune the parameters of an electrophysiological model of nerve cells, to fit experimental data obtained by calcium imaging.…
Dimension reduction is a common strategy to study non-linear dynamical systems composed by a large number of variables. The goal is to find a smaller version of the system whose time evolution is easier to predict while preserving some of…
Physical learning is an emerging paradigm in science and engineering whereby (meta)materials acquire desired macroscopic behaviors by exposure to examples. So far, it has been applied to static properties such as elastic moduli and…
We introduce SIM-CE, an advanced, user-friendly modeling and simulation environment in Simulink for performing multi-scale behavioral analysis of the nervous system of Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). SIM-CE contains an implementation…
Animals flexibly recombine a finite set of core motor motifs to meet diverse task demands, but existing behavior segmentation methods oversimplify this process by imposing discrete syllables under restrictive generative assumptions. To…
We analyze 3D flight paths of bumblebees searching for nectar in a laboratory experiment with and without predation risk from artificial spiders. For the flight velocities we find mixed probability distributions reflecting the access to the…
Spatial patterning can be crucially important for understanding the behavior of interacting populations. Here we investigate a simple model of parasite and host populations in which parasites are random walkers that must come into contact…
Movement is a fundamental behaviour of organisms that brings about beneficial encounters with resources and mates, but at the same time exposes the organism to dangerous encounters with predators. The movement patterns adopted by organisms…
Nematodes have evolved to swim in highly viscous environments. Artificial mechanisms that mimic the locomotory functions of nematodes can be efficient viscous pumps. We experimentally simulate the motion of the head segment of…
Active fluids, such as cytoskeletal filaments, bacterial colonies and epithelial cell layers, exhibit distinctive orientational coherence, often characterized by nematic order and topological defects. By contrast, little is known about…
We investigate the role of a specifically warped extra dimension in constructing examples of higher dimensional spacetimes representing Lorentzian wormholes. The warping chosen is largely inspired by the well-known non-static Witten bubble…
The centimeter-scale cyborg insects have a potential advantage for application in narrow environments where humans cannot operate. To realize such tasks, researchers have developed a small printed-circuit-board (PCB) which an insect can…
This paper presents Wanderer, a model of how autonomous adaptive systems coordinate internal biological needs with moment-by-moment assessments of the probabilities of events in the external world. The extent to which Wanderer moves about…
For nearly three decades, spatial games have produced a wealth of insights to the study of behavior and its relation to population structure. However, as different rules and factors are added or altered, the dynamics of spatial models often…
Geometric mechanics provides valuable insights into how biological and robotic systems use changes in shape to move by mechanically interacting with their environment. In high-friction environments it provides that the entire interaction is…
Locomotion by shape changes (spermatozoon swimming, snake slithering, bird flapping) or gas expulsion (rocket firing) is assumed to require environmental interaction, due to conservation of momentum. As first noted in (Wisdom, 2003) and…