Related papers: Across and beyond the cell are peptide strings
Cellular heterogeneity is an immanent property of biological systems that covers very different aspects of life ranging from genetic diversity to cell-to-cell variability driven by stochastic molecular interactions, and noise induced cell…
In this opening talk I first describe how we are entering a data-rich era, and what clues we might soon have to physics beyond the SM (on a time scale of several years). Then we turn to a number of the basic issues we hope to explain, and…
Cell structures were introduced by W. Debski and E. Tymchatyn as a way to study some classes of topological spaces and their continuous functions by means of discrete approximations. In this work we weaken the notion of cell structure and…
Cardiovascular networks span the body by branching across many generations of vessels. The resulting structure delivers blood over long distances to supply all cells with oxygen via the relatively short-range process of diffusion at the…
Currently, biological signaling is envisaged as a combination of activation and movement, triggered by local molecular interactions and molecular diffusion, respectively. However, we here suggest, that other fundamental physical mechanisms…
One of the longest standing open problems in science is how life arises from non-living matter. If it is possible to measure this transition in the lab, then it might be possible to understand the physical mechanisms by which the emergence…
The advent of molecular biology has led to the identification of definitive causative factors for a number of diseases, most of which are monogenic. Causes for most common diseases across the population, however, seem elusive and cannot be…
Basic problems in complex systems are surveyed in connection with Life. As a key issue for complex systems, complementarity between syntax/rule/parts and semantics/behavior/whole is stressed. To address the issue, a constructive approach…
Embryogenesis, the process by which an organism forms and develops, has long been and still is a major field of investigation in the natural sciences. By which means, which forces, are embryonic cells and tissues assembled, deformed, and…
Recent decades have seen the discovery of numerous complex materials. At the root of the complexity underlying many of these materials lies a large number of possible contending atomic- and larger-scale configurations and the intricate…
The importance of molecular-scale forces in sculpting biological form and function has been acknowledged for more than a century. Accounting for forces in biology is a problem that lies at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics,…
Life has a special status, it even has its own science: biology. In many ways, the logic of life seems to differ from that of atoms, molecules, planets, or any other `inanimate object'. However, life is increasingly measured using…
Ever since the advent of molecular biology in the 1970s, mechanical models have become the dogma in the field, where a "true" understanding of any subject is equated to a mechanistic description. This has been to the detriment of the…
The physical idea of the natural origin of diseases and deaths has been presented. The fundamental microscopical reason is the destruction of any metastable state by thermal activation of a nucleus of a nonreversable change. On the basis of…
Much information about a graph can be obtained by studying its spanning trees. On the other hand, a graph can be regarded as a 1-dimensional cell complex, raising the question of developing a theory of trees in higher dimension. As observed…
The concept of evolutionary development of structures constituted a \emph{real} revolution in biology: it was possible to understand how the very complex structures of life can arise in an out-of-equilibrium system. The investigation of…
Cosmic strings are linear concentrations of energy that form whenever phase transitions in the early universe break axial symmetries as originally shown by Kibble. They are the result of frustrated order in the quantum fields responsible…
Unlike most synthetic materials, biological materials often stiffen as they are deformed. This nonlinear elastic response, critical for the physiological function of some tissues, has been documented since at least the 19th century, but the…
Discovered by Christopher Alexander, living structure is a physical phenomenon, through which the quality of the built environment or artifacts can be judged objectively. It bears two distinguished properties just like a tree: "far more…
We introduce and develop the theory of metaparticles. At the classical level, this is a world-line theory with the usual reparameterization invariance and two additional features. The theory is motivated by string theory on compact targets,…