Related papers: Computers from plants we never made. Speculations

The fields of Origin of Life and Artificial Life both question what life is and how it emerges from a distinct set of "pre-life" dynamics. One common feature of most substrates where life emerges is a marked shift in dynamics when…

We address the problem of building theoretical models that help elucidate the function of the visual brain at computational/algorithmic and structural/mechanistic levels. We seek to understand how the receptive fields and topographic maps…

Rooted phylogenetic networks are used by biologists to infer and represent complex evolutionary relationships between species that cannot be accurately explained by a phylogenetic tree. Tree-child networks are a particular class of rooted…

The main deficiency of the algorithms running on digital computers nowadays is their inability to change themselves during the execution. In line with this, the paper introduces the so-called replicated algorithms, inspired by the concept…

Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…

Why are living systems complex? Why does the biosphere contain living beings with complexity features beyond those of the simplest replicators? What kind of evolutionary pressures result in more complex life forms? These are key questions…

Robot perception is far from what humans are capable of. Humans do not only have a complex semantic scene understanding but also extract fine-grained intra-object properties for the salient ones. When humans look at plants, they naturally…

The accurate classification of plant organs is a key step in monitoring the growing status and physiology of plants. A classification method was proposed to classify the leaves and stems of potted plants automatically based on the point…

An astonishingly diverse biomolecular circuitry orchestrates the functioning machinery underlying every living cell. These biomolecules and their circuits have been engineered not only for various industrial applications but also to perform…

Since they became observable, neuron morphologies have been informally compared with biological trees but they are studied by distinct communities, neuroscientists, and ecologists. The apparent structural similarity suggests there may be…

An increasing number of electronics are directly embedded on the clothing to monitor human status (e.g., skeletal motion) or provide haptic feedback. A specific challenge to prototype and fabricate such a clothing is to design the wiring…

An evolutionary tree is a rooted tree where each internal vertex has at least two children and where the leaves are labeled with distinct symbols representing species. Evolutionary trees are useful for modeling the evolutionary history of…

Computational methods are the most effective tools we have besides scientific experiments to explore the properties of complex biological systems. Progress is slowing because digital silicon computers have reached their limits in terms of…

Systems biology of plants offers myriad opportunities and many challenges in modeling. A number of technical challenges stem from paucity of computational methods for discovery of the most fundamental properties of complex dynamical…

Growing global concerns about climate change highlight the need for environmentally sustainable computing. The ecological impact of computing, including operational and embodied, is a key consideration. Field Programmable Gate Arrays…

This study presents a theoretical model for a self-replicating mechanical system inspired by biological processes within living cells and supported by computer simulations. The model decomposes self-replication into core components, each of…

We formalize an existing computability-theoretic method of presenting first-order structures whose domains have the cardinality of the continuum. Work using these methods until now has emphasized their topological properties. We shift the…

We explore methods for constructing normal forms of indecomposable quiver representations. The first part of the paper develops homological tools for recursively constructing families of indecomposable representations from indecomposables…

Tree-child networks are a recently-described class of directed acyclic graphs that have risen to prominence in phylogenetics (the study of evolutionary trees and networks). Although these networks have a number of attractive mathematical…

To maintain homeostasis, living cells process information with networks of interacting molecules. Traditional models for cellular information processing have focused on networks of chemical reactions between molecules. Here, we describe how…