Related papers: Are biological systems poised at criticality?

Cellular biology exists embedded in a world dominated by random dynamics and chance. Many vital molecules and pieces of cellular machinery diffuse within cells, moving along random trajectories as they collide with the other biomolecular…

A coupled map is suggested to investigate various spatial or temporal designs in biology: Several cells (or tissues) in an organ are considered as connected to each other in terms of some molecular diffusions or electrical potential…

Following extensive numerical experiments, it has been suggested that the evolution of competing computer programs in artificial life simulations shows signs of being a self-organized critical process. The primary evidence for this claim…

Cities are systems with a large number of constituents and agents interacting with each other and can be considered as emblematic of complex systems. Modeling these systems is a real challenge and triggered the interest of many disciplines…

Biological and robotic grasp and manipulation are undeniably similar at the level of mechanical task performance. However, their underlying fundamental biological vs. engineering mechanisms are, by definition, dramatically different and can…

While evolution has inspired algorithmic methods of heuristic optimisation, little has been done in the way of using concepts of computation to advance our understanding of salient aspects of biological phenomena. We argue that under…

Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…

Biological systems and processes are networks of complex nonlinear regulatory interactions between nucleic acids, proteins, and metabolites. A natural way in which to represent these interaction networks is through the use of a graph. In…

A large variety of complex systems in ecology, climate science, biomedicine and engineering have been observed to exhibit tipping points, where the internal dynamical state of the system abruptly changes. For example, such critical…

The mathematical models used to capture features of complex, biological systems are typically non-linear, meaning that there are no generally valid simple relationships between their outputs and the data that might be used to validate them.…

Existing decision-theoretic reasoning frameworks such as decision networks use simple data structures and processes. However, decisions are often made based on complex data structures, such as social networks and protein sequences, and rich…

Biological systems reach organizational complexity that far exceeds the complexity of any known inanimate objects. Biological entities undoubtedly obey the laws of quantum physics and statistical mechanics. However, is modern physics…

Many biological, physical, and social interactions have a particular dependence on where they take place. In living cells, protein movement between the nucleus and cytoplasm affects cellular response (i.e., proteins must be present in the…

In the so-called "microscopic" models of vehicular traffic, attention is paid explicitly to each individual vehicle each of which is represented by a "particle"; the nature of the "interactions" among these particles is determined by the…

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…

A vast array of transformative technologies developed over the past decade has enabled measurement and perturbation at ever increasing scale, yet our understanding of many systems remains limited by experimental capacity. Overcoming this…

A reflection of our ultimate understanding of a complex system is our ability to control its behavior. Typically, control has multiple prerequisites: It requires an accurate map of the network that governs the interactions between the…

The nervous system displays a variety of rhythms in both waking and sleep. These rhythms have been closely associated with different behavioral and cognitive states, but it is still unknown how the nervous system makes use of these rhythms…

The combination of the compactness of networks, featuring small diameters, and their complex architectures results in a variety of critical effects dramatically different from those in cooperative systems on lattices. In the last few years,…

Over the last decade new technologies for making large numbers of fine-grained measurements have led to the surprising discovery that many biological systems sit near a critical point. These systems are potentially more adaptive in that…