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Life occurs in concentrated `Ringer Solutions' derived from seawater that Lesser Blum studied for most of his life. As we worked together, Lesser and I realized that the questions asked of those solutions were quite different in biology…
Over the past century, nonlinear difference and differential equations have been used to understand conditions for species coexistence. However, these models fail to account for random fluctuations due to demographic and environmental…
Biological systems rely on robust internal information processing: Survival depends on highly reproducible dynamics of regulatory processes. Biological information processing elements, however, are intrinsically noisy (genetic switches,…
We introduce an ambidextrous view of stochastic dynamical systems, comparing their forward-time and reverse-time representations and then integrating them into a single time-symmetric representation. The perspective is useful theoretically,…
Adaptive transport networks in biological and physical systems exhibit hierarchical organization, characteristic channel spacing, and robust scaling relations. Existing adaptive network models, formulated on a lattice, successfully…
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…
Spatial structure and species interactions jointly shape the dynamics and biodiversity of ecological systems, yet most theoretical models either neglect spatial heterogeneity or sacrifice analytical tractability. Here, we provide a unified…
How do networks of relationships evolve over time? We analyse a dataset tracking the social interactions of 900 individuals over four years. Despite continuous shifts in individual relationships, the macroscopic structural properties of the…
Stochastic dynamical systems arise naturally across nearly all areas of science and engineering. Typically, a dynamical system model is based on some prior knowledge about the underlying dynamics of interest in which probabilistic features…
Many biological phenomena or social events critically depend on how information evolves in complex networks. However, a general theory to characterize information evolution is yet absent. Consequently, numerous unknowns remain about the…
Natural systems are remarkably robust and resilient, maintaining essential functions despite variability, uncertainty, and hostile conditions. Understanding these nonlinear, dynamic behaviours is challenging because such systems involve…
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…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
We consider a stochastic individual based model where each predator searches during a random time and then manipulates its prey or rests. The time distributions may be non-exponential. An age structure allows to describe these interactions…
Organisms and ecological groups accumulate evidence to make decisions. Classic experiments and theoretical studies have explored this process when the correct choice is fixed during each trial. However, we live in a constantly changing…
Living systems are hierarchical control systems that display a small world network structure, in which many smaller clusters are nested within fewer larger ones, producing a fractal-like structure with a power-law cluster size distribution…
Unstoppable feedback loops and tipping points in socio-ecological systems are the main threats to sustainability. These behaviors have been extensively studied, notably to predict, and arguably deviate, dead-end trajectories. Behind the…
Long ago, life obtained nucleotides in the course of evolution and became a vehicle for them. Before assembly with nucleotides, in the pre-RNA era, what system dominated heredity? What was the subject of survival competition? Is it still a…
Many regenerative arguments in stochastic processes use random times which are akin to stopping times, but which are determined by the future as well as the past behaviour of the process of interest. Such arguments based on "conditioning on…
Macroscopic dynamical descriptions of complex physical systems are crucial for understanding and controlling material behavior. With the growing availability of data and compute, machine learning has become a promising alternative to…