Related papers: Field-control, phase-transitions, and life's emerg…
Based on laboratory based growth of plant-like structures from inorganic materials, we present new theory for the emergence of plant structure at a range of scales dictated by levels of ionization (charge density), which can be traced…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
Biological systems reach hierarchical complexity that has no counterpart outside the realm of biology. Undoubtedly, biological entities obey the fundamental physical laws. Can today's physics provide an explanatory framework for…
Controlling self-organizing systems is challenging because the system responds to the controller. Here we develop a model that captures the essential self-organizing mechanisms of Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld (BTW) sandpiles on networks, a…
A self-organising model is proposed to explain the criticality in cortical networks deduced from recent observations of neuronal avalanches. Prevailing understanding of self-organised criticality (SOC) dictates that conservation of energy…
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…
The notion of Self-organized criticality (SOC) had been conceived to interpret the spontaneous emergence of long range correlations in nature. Since then many different models had been introduced to study SOC. All of them have few common…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…
Self-organized criticality is a well-established phenomenon, where a system dynamically tunes its structure to operate on the verge of a phase transition. Here, we show that the dynamics inside the self-organized critical state are…
Self-organized criticality has been proposed to be a universal mechanism for the emergence of scale-free dynamics in many complex systems, and possibly in the brain. While such scale-free patterns were identified experimentally in many…
It is proposed that self-organisation (SO) in non-equilibrium systems is governed by a general principle: it emerges when a minute subset of system configurations are exceptionally stable and long-lived to survive the noise generated by the…
The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…
The concept of Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) was proposed in an attempt to explain the widespread appearance of power-law in nature. It describes a mechanism in which a system reaches spontaneously a state where the characteristic events…
The improbability of a spontaneously generated self-assembling molecule has suggested that life began with a set of simpler, collectively replicating elements, such as an enclosed autocatalytic set of polymers (or protocell). Since…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
In functionally complex systems, higher-order connectivity is often revealed in the underlying geometry of networked units. Furthermore, such systems often show signatures of self-organized criticality, a specific type of non-equilibrium…
We review the properties of the self-organized critical (SOC) forest-fire model. The paradigm of self-organized criticality refers to the tendency of certain large dissipative systems to drive themselves into a critical state independent of…
Many of life's most fascinating phenomena emerge from interactions among many elements--many amino acids determine the structure of a single protein, many genes determine the fate of a cell, many neurons are involved in shaping our thoughts…
The managed-metabolism hypothesis suggests that a cooperation barrier must be overcome if self-producing chemical organizations are to transition from non-life to life. This barrier prevents un-managed, self-organizing, autocatalytic…
Driven soft athermal systems may display a reversible-irreversible transition between an absorbing, arrested state and an active phase where a steady-state dynamics sets in. A paradigmatic example consists in cyclically sheared suspensions…