Related papers: Entropy and its relationship to allometry
Recently, West et al. claimed to derive a general quantitative model based on fundamental principles for the allocation of metabolic energy between maintenance of existing tissue and the production of new biomass, and in addition claimed to…
Production of energy (metabolism) and its distribution is vital for living organisms, both at individual level - between different functions of an organism, as well as between species of communities at different organizational levels,…
A set of general allometric scaling laws is derived for different systems represented by tree networks. The formulation postulates self-similar networks with an arbitrary number of branches developed in each generation, and with an…
The solution space of genome-scale models of cellular metabolism provides a map between physically viable flux configurations and cellular metabolic phenotypes described, at the most basic level, by the corresponding growth rates. By…
In a cell or microorganism the processes that generate mass, energy, information transfer, and cell fate specification are seamlessly integrated through a complex network of various cellular constituents and reactions. However, despite the…
Natural selection has produced an extraordinary diversity of life histories spanning many orders of magnitude in body size, vital rates, and biological times. In general, big and cold organisms grow and reproduce slowly and live long lives;…
Physical thermodynamic and kinetic, chemical and biological reasoning restrict the spatial dimensions of living cells and confine them to between one and one hundred micrometers. Cells should necessarily be macroscopic, dissipative objects,…
Nature's many complex systems--physical, biological, and cultural--are islands of low-entropy order within increasingly disordered seas of surrounding, high-entropy chaos. Energy is a principal facilitator of the rising complexity of all…
Individual resource intake rates are known to depend on both individual body size and resource availability. Here, we have developed a model to integrate these two drivers, accounting explicitly for the scaling of perceived resource…
Metabolic allometry, a common pattern in nature, is a close-to-3/4-power scaling law between metabolic rate and body mass in organisms, across and within species. An analogous relationship between metabolic rate and water volume in river…
Two principles explain emergence. First, in the Receipt's reference frame, Deg(S) = 4/3 Deg(R), where Supply S is an isotropic radiative energy source, Receipt R receives S's energy, and Deg is a system's degrees of freedom based on its…
The energy dissipated by a living organism is commonly identified with heat generation. However, as cells exchange metabolites with their environment they also dissipate energy in the form of chemical entropy. How dissipation is distributed…
We study the statistical underpinnings of life. We question some common assumptions about the thermodynamics of life and illustrate how, contrary to widespread belief, even in a closed system entropy growth can accompany an increase in…
Growth patterns of complex systems predict how they change in sizes, numbers, masses, etc. Understanding growth is important, especially for many biological, ecological, urban, and socioeconomic systems. One noteworthy growth behavior is…
An ecological flow network is a weighted directed graph in which nodes are species, edges are "who eats whom" relationships and weights are rates of energy or nutrients transfer between species. Allometric scaling is a ubiquitous feature…
Integrated global food system analysis is hampered by the fragmentation of data among food types, processes, and scales. Studies also often neglect the connection to human metabolism -- the ultimate driver of food demand. Here we use a…
During overflow metabolism, cells excrete glycolytic byproducts when growing under aerobic conditions in a seemingly wasteful fashion. While potentially advantageous for microbes with finite oxidative capacity, its role in higher organisms…
As is well known, black hole entropy is proportional to the area of the horizon suggesting a holographic principle wherein all degrees of freedom contributing to the entropy reside on the surface. In this note, we point out that large scale…
We review recent findings that the universe on its largest scales shows hints of the violation of statistical isotropy, in particular alignment with the geometry and direction of motion of the solar system, and missing power at scales…
A classic problem in metabolism is that fast-proliferating cells use seemingly wasteful fermentation for energy biogenesis in the presence of sufficient oxygen. This counterintuitive phenomenon, known as overflow metabolism or the Warburg…