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The use of brain images as markers for diseases or behavioral differences is challenged by the small effects size and the ensuing lack of power, an issue that has incited researchers to rely more systematically on large cohorts. Coupled…
We study the effect of correlations in generation times on the dynamics of population growth of microorganisms. We show that any non-zero correlation that is due to cell-size regulation, no matter how small, induces long-term oscillations…
We investigate the evolution of populations of random Boolean networks under selection for robustness of the dynamics with respect to the perturbation of the state of a node. The fitness landscape contains a huge plateau of maximum fitness…
Brain is one of the most energy demanding organs in mammals, and its total metabolic rate scales with brain volume raised to a power of around 5/6. This value is significantly higher than the more common exponent 3/4 relating whole body…
We describe the simulation method of modelling the population evolution using Monte Carlo based on the Penna model. Individuals in the populations are represented by their diploid genomes. Genes expressed after the minimum reproduction age…
White matter in mammal brains forms a densely interconnected communication network. Due to high edge density, along with continuous generation and spread of messages, brain networks must contend with congestion, which may limit polysynaptic…
When a collection of phenotypically diverse organisms compete with each other for limited resources, with competition being strongest amongst the most similar, the population can evolve into tightly localised clusters. This process can be…
Human physical reasoning relies on internal "body" representations - coarse, volumetric approximations that capture an object's extent and support intuitive predictions about motion and physics. While psychophysical evidence suggests humans…
Cell growth in size is a complex process coordinated by intrinsic and environmental signals. In a recent work [Tzur et al., Science, 2009, 325:167-171], size distributions in an exponentially growing population of mammalian cells were used…
Neural spikes in the brain form stochastic sequences, i.e., belong to the class of pulse noises. This stochasticity is a counterintuitive feature because extracting information - such as the commonly supposed neural information of mean…
This article is about the neural conundrum behind the slowness of human behavior. The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at ~10^9 bits/s. The stark contrast between…
Holographic considerations are used in the scrutiny of a special class of brane-world cosmologies. Inherently to this class, the brane typically bounces, at a finite size, as a consequence of a charged black hole in the bulk. Whereas a…
How does the size of a neural circuit influence its learning performance? Intuitively, we expect the learning capacity of a neural circuit to grow with the number of neurons and synapses. Larger brains tend to be found in species with…
With distinct advantages in power over behavioral phenotypes, brain imaging traits have become emerging endophenotypes to dissect molecular contributions to behaviors and neuropsychiatric illnesses. Among different imaging features, brain…
Fully convolutional neural networks can process input of arbitrary size by applying a combination of downsampling and pooling. However, we find that fully convolutional image classifiers are not agnostic to the input size but rather show…
Cognitive neuroscience is enjoying rapid increase in extensive public brain-imaging datasets. It opens the door to large-scale statistical models. Finding a unified perspective for all available data calls for scalable and automated…
Some modern cosmological models predict the appearance of Boltzmann Brains: observers who randomly fluctuate out of a thermal bath rather than naturally evolving from a low-entropy Big Bang. A theory in which most observers are of the…
The last few million years on planet Earth have witnessed two remarkable phases of hominid development, starting with a phase of biological evolution characterised by rather rapid increase of the size of the brain. This has been followed by…
Biological and artificial intelligence systems navigate the fundamental efficiency-robustness tradeoff for optimal encoding, i.e., they must efficiently encode numerous attributes of the input space while also being robust to noise. This…
The natural evolution of life seems to proceed through steps characterized by phases of relatively rapid changes, followed by longer, more stable periods. In the light of the string-theory derived physical scenario proposed in [1], we…