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Animals have evolved distinctive survival strategies in response to constant selective pressure. In this review, we highlight how animals exploit complex flow phenomena by manipulating their habitat or by producing complex fluids. In…
Social norms and conventions are commonly accepted and adopted behaviors and practices within a social group that guide interactions -- e.g., how to spell a word or how to greet people -- and are central to a group's culture and identity.…
Many real world systems are at risk of undergoing critical transitions, leading to sudden qualitative and sometimes irreversible regime shifts. The development of early warning signals is recognized as a major challenge. Recent progress…
This paper summarizes a presentation for a panel discussion on "The Future of Astrostatistics" held at the Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy V conference at Pennsylvania State University in June 2011. I argue that the emerging…
What features characterise complex system dynamics? Power laws and scale invariance of fluctuations are often taken as the hallmarks of complexity, drawing on analogies with equilibrium critical phenomena[1-3]. Here we argue that slow,…
Behavior of condensed matter systems deviating from the standard equilibrium conditions is discussed. Statistical properties of coupled dynamic-stochastic systems are studied within a combination of the maximum information principle and the…
The Magicicada spp. life cycles with its prime periods and highly synchronized emergence have defied reasonable scientific explanation since its discovery. During the last decade several models and explanations for this phenomenon appeared…
These are notes for a set of 7 two-hour lectures given at the 2010 Summer School on Quantitative Evolutionary and Comparative Genomics at OIST, Okinawa, Japan. The emphasis is on understanding how biological systems process information. We…
At the physiological level, aging is neither rigid nor unchangeable. Instead, the molecular and mechanisms driving aging are sufficiently plastic that a variety of diverse interventions--dietary, pharmaceutical, and genetic--have been…
Networks have attracted a burst of attention in the last decade, with applications to natural, social, and technological systems. While networks provide a powerful abstraction for investigating relationships and interactions, the…
This essay provides a critical overview of the mathematical kinetic theory of active particles, which is used to model and study collective systems consisting of interacting living entities, such as those involved in behavior and evolution.…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
Rock is wrapped by paper, paper is cut by scissors, and scissors are crushed by rock. This simple game is popular among children and adults to decide on trivial disputes that have no obvious winner, but cyclic dominance is also at the heart…
The dynamics of biological systems, from proteins to cells to organisms, is complex and stochastic. To decipher their physical laws, we need to bridge between experimental observations and theoretical modeling. Thanks to progress in…
Containing the spreading of crime in urban societies remains a major challenge. Empirical evidence suggests that, left unchecked, crimes may be recurrent and proliferate. On the other hand, eradicating a culture of crime may be difficult,…
Since the turn of the millennium, computational modelling of biological systems has evolved remarkably and sees matured use spanning basic and clinical research. While the topic of the peri-millennial debate about the virtues and…
Many social, technological and biological interactions involve network relationships whose outcome intimately depends on the structure of the network and on the strengths of the connections. Yet, although much information is now available…
During this last decade our knowledge of the evolutionary properties of stars has significantly improved. This result has been achieved thanks to our improved understanding of the physical behavior of stellar matter in the thermal regimes…
This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…
Many real-world scientific processes are governed by complex nonlinear dynamic systems that can be represented by differential equations. Recently, there has been increased interest in learning, or discovering, the forms of the equations…