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All living things exhibit adaptations that enable them to survive and reproduce in the natural environment that they inhabit. From a biological standpoint, it has long been understood that adaptation comes from natural selection, whereby…
It is shown that the laws of thermodynamics are extremely robust under generalizations of the form of entropy. Using the Bregman-type relative entropy, the Clausius inequality is proved to be always valid. This implies that thermodynamics…
The Carnot statement of the second law of thermodynamics poses an upper limit on the efficiency of all heat engines. Recently, it has been studied whether generic quantum features such as coherence and quantum entanglement could allow for…
The integrable system is constrained strictly by the conservation law during the time evolution, and the nearly integrable system or nonintegrable system is also constrained by the conserved parameters (like the constants of motion) with…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
A thermodynamic device placed outdoors, or a local ecosystem, is subject to a variety of different temperatures given by short-tem (daily) and long-term (seasonal) variations. In the long term a superstatistical description makes sense,…
Some models within the framework of Gauss-Bonnet gravities are considered in the presence of a non-minimally coupled scalar field. By imposing a particular constraint on the scalar field coupling, an extension of the called…
Recent research has extended methods from the fields of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics into other disciplines. Most notably, one recent work creates a unified theoretical framework to understand evolutionary biology, machine…
The thermodynamic maximum principle for the Boltzmann-Gibbs-Shannon (BGS) entropy is reconsidered by combining elements from group and measure theory. Our analysis starts by noting that the BGS entropy is a special case of relative entropy.…
We present a new outlook on the climate system thermodynamics, studying some of its macroscopic properties in terms of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics. We review and clarify the notion of efficiency of the climate system by…
A paradigm for isothermal, mechanical rectification of stochastic fluctuations is introduced in this paper. The central idea is to transform energy injected by random perturbations into rigid-body rotational kinetic energy. The prototype…
A class of models for large-scale evolution and mass extinctions is presented. These models incorporate environmental changes on all scales, from influences on a single species to global effects. This is a step towards a unified picture of…
Depending on the exact experimental conditions, the thermodynamic properties of physical systems can be related to one or more thermostatistical ensembles. Here, we survey the notion of thermodynamic temperature in different statistical…
According to classical Boltzmannian thermodynamics, the efficiency of a cyclic machine is strictly lower than one. Such a result is a straightforward consequence of the second principle of thermodynamics. Recent advances in the study of the…
The climate system is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The system exhibits natural variability on many scales of motion, in time as well as space, and it is subject…
Using the fluctuation theorem supplemented with geometric arguments, we derive universal features of the (long-time) efficiency fluctuations for thermal and isothermal machines operating under steady or periodic driving, close or far from…
The response of ecosystems to perturbations is considered from a thermodynamic perspective by acknowledging that, as for all macroscopic systems and processes, the dynamics and stability of ecosystems is subject to definite thermodynamic…
The fundamental issue in the energetic performance of power plants, working both as traditional fuel engines and as combined cycle turbine (gas-steam), lies in quantifying the internal irreversibilities which are associated with the working…
We brief{}ly review the connection between statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. We show that, in order to satisfy thermodynamics and its Legendre transformation mathematical frame, the celebrated Boltzmann-Gibbs~(BG) statistical…
An ensemble of classical subsystems interacting with surrounding particles has been considered. In general case, a phase volume of the subsystems ensemble was shown to be a function of time. The evolutional equations of the ensemble are…