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The evolutionary transition to multicellularity transformed life on earth, allowing for the evolution of large, complex organisms. While multicellularity can be strongly advantageous, its earliest stages bring unique physical challenges.…
Two basic features of assemblages of unicellular plankton: (1) their high biodiversity and (2) the power-law structure of their abundance, can be explained by an allometric scaling of cell growth and mortality with respect to cell size. To…
Photophoretic forces - which are of thermal origin - have defined an alternative route of optical trapping of absorbing microparticles in air. Here, we show that a single multi-mode fiber facilitates significantly more robust optical traps…
We consider bio-inspired ring systems as photovoltaic circuits to explore the advantage of `optical ratcheting', a process whereby the arrangement of coupled optical dipoles enables delocalised excitonic states that are protected against…
Arabidopsis roots show oscillatory growth patterns on homogeneous agar surfaces, whereas other plants, such as maize, do not. Although several explanations have been proposed, a simple and general model that makes testable predictions…
Many recent approaches in representation learning implicitly assume that uncorrelated views of a data point are sufficient to learn meaningful representations for various downstream tasks. In this work, we challenge this assumption and…
Access to below-canopy volumetric vegetation data is crucial for understanding ecosystem dynamics. We address the long-standing limitation of remote sensing to penetrate deep into dense canopy layers. LiDAR and radar are currently…
Micropatterned substrates are often used to standardize cell experiments and to quantitatively study the relation between cell shape and function. Moreover, they are increasingly used in combination with traction force microscopy on soft…
Over the last decades, light-emitting diodes (LED) have replaced common light bulbs in almost every application, from flashlights in smartphones to automotive headlights. Illuminating nightly streets requires LEDs to emit a light spectrum…
We investigate strong lensing by non-singular finite isothermal ellipsoids taking into account the influence of the matter along the line of sight and in the close lens vicinity. We compare three descriptions of light propagation: the full…
In this work, we introduce a random field in view of natural image modeling, obtained as a limit of sequences of dead leaves models, when considering arbitrarily small or big objects. The dead leaves model, introduced by the Mathematical…
It has been a great challenge to achieve the direct light manipulation of matter on a bulk scale. In this work, the direct light propulsion of matter was observed on a macroscopic scale for the first time using a bulk graphene based…
Cartilage is a connective tissue that covers the surfaces of bones in joints and provides a smooth gliding surface for movement. It is characterized by specific biophysical properties that allow it to withstand compressive loads, distribute…
Weight-balanced trees are a popular form of self-balancing binary search trees. Their popularity is due to desirable guarantees, for example regarding the required work to balance annotated trees. While usual weight-balanced trees perform…
Plant reflectance spectra - the profile of light reflected by leaves across different wavelengths - supply the spectral signature for a species at a spatial location to enable estimation of functional and taxonomic diversity for plants. We…
A model of the regular arrangement of leaves on a plant stem (phyllotactic patterns) is proposed, based on a new plant pattern algorithm. Tripartite patterning is proposed to occur by the interaction of two signaling pathways. Each pathway…
After decades of work, the growth of continuous thin films, i.e., two-dimensional structures, is progressively becoming a technological issue more than a field of fundamental research. Incidentally self-organization of nanostructures on…
Light trapping for solar cells can reduce production cost and improve energy conversion efficiency. Understanding some of the basic theoretical constraints on light trapping is therefore of fundamental importance. Here, we develop a general…
Earth's deciduous plants have a sharp order-of-magnitude increase in leaf reflectance between approximately 700 and 750 nm wavelength. This strong reflectance of Earth's vegetation suggests that surface biosignatures with sharp spectral…
How might systematic left-right (L/R) asymmetry of the body plan originate in multicellular animals (and plants)? Somehow, the microscopic handedness of biological molecules must be brought up to macroscopic scales. Basic symmetry…