Related papers: Complex fluids in the animal kingdom
We study the capture of a diffusing "lamb" by diffusing "lions" in one dimension. The capture dynamics is exactly soluble by probabilistic techniques when the number of lions is very small, and is tractable by extreme statistics…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
While "complexity science" has achieved significant successes in several interdisciplinary fields such as economics and biology, it is only a very recent observation that legal systems -- from the way legal texts are drafted and connected…
Unlike coffee and cream that homogenize when stirred, growing micro-organisms (e.g., bacteria, baker's yeast) can actively kill each other and avoid mixing. How do such antagonistic interactions impact the growth and survival of competing…
Sheep are gregarious animals, and they often aggregate into dense, cohesive flocks, especially under stress. In this paper, we use image processing tools to analyze a publicly available aerial video showing a dense sheep flock moving under…
Motility is a fundamental feature of living matter, encompassing single cells and collective behavior. Such living systems are characterized by non-conservativity of energy and a large diversity of spatio-temporal patterns. Thus,…
How producers of public goods persist in microbial communities is a major question in evolutionary biology. Cooperation is evolutionarily unstable, since cheating strains can reproduce quicker and take over. Spatial structure has been shown…
The acoustofluidic method holds great promise for manipulating microorganisms. When exposed to the steady vortex structures of acoustic streaming flow, these microorganisms exhibit intriguing dynamic behaviors, such as hydrodynamic trapping…
Most complex networks serve as conduits for various dynamical processes, ranging from mass transfer by chemical reactions in the cell to packet transfer on the Internet. We collected data on the time dependent activity of five natural and…
The possibility to use competitive evolutionary algorithms to generate long-term progress is normally prevented by the convergence on limit cycle dynamics in which the evolving agents keep progressing against their current competitors by…
Fluid flow networks are ubiquitous and can be found in a broad range of contexts, from human-made systems such as water supply networks to living systems like animal and plant vasculature. In many cases, the elements forming these networks…
Fish in schooling formations navigate complex flow-fields replete with mechanical energy in the vortex wakes of their companions. Their schooling behaviour has been associated with evolutionary advantages including collective energy…
Collective motion is a phenomenon observed across length scales in nature, from bacterial swarming and tissue migration to the flocking of animals. The mechanisms underlying this behavior vary significantly depending on the biological…
Although human beings have known about the phenomenon of "flocking"- that is, the coherent movement of large numbers of creatures (flocks of birds, schools of fish, herds of woolly mammoths, etc.)- since prehistoric times, it is only in the…
Complex systems' modeling and simulation are powerful ways to investigate a multitude of natural phenomena providing extended knowledge on their structure and behavior. However, enhanced modeling and simulation require integration of…
Over the past decade, advances in generative modeling, such as generative adversarial networks, masked autoencoders, and diffusion models, have significantly transformed biological research and discovery, enabling breakthroughs in molecule…
Evolutionary game theory has been successfully used to investigate the dynamics of systems, in which many entities have competitive interactions. From a physics point of view, it is interesting to study conditions under which a coordination…
We provide an analytic, microscopic analysis of extreme events in an adaptive population comprising competing agents (e.g. species, cells, traders, data-packets). Such large changes tend to dictate the long-term dynamical behaviour of many…
We have simulated the temporal evolution of pressure due to capillary and viscous forces in two-phase drainage in porous media. We analyze our result in light of macroscopic flow equations for two-phase flow. We also investigate the effect…
The interaction of flexible polymers with fluid flows leads to a number of intriguing phenomena observed in laboratory experiments, namely drag reduction, elastic turbulence and heat transport modification in natural convection, and is one…