Related papers: Disease from opposing forces in regulatory control

The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…

We study a model in which two players with opposing interests try to alter a status quo through instability-generating actions. We show that instability can be used to secure longer-term durable changes, even if it is costly to generate and…

Oscillations are observed in all branches of science and culture, ranging from the behavior of ele-mentary particles, atoms, molecules in simple chemical or physical systems or even in complex organisms, up to oscillations of the behavior…

The dynamics of economies and infectious disease are inexorably linked: economic well-being influences health (sanitation, nutrition, treatment capacity, etc.) and health influences economic well-being (labor productivity lost to sickness…

Obesity is a chronic disease that can lead to an increased risk of other serious chronic diseases and even death. We present switching and time-delayed feedback-based model free control methods for the dynamic management of body mass and…

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by increased response times leading to a variety of biomechanical symptoms such as tremors, stooping and gait instability. Although the deterioration in biomechanical…

Cells are known to exert forces to sense their physical surroundings for guidance of motion and fate decisions. Here, we propose that cells might do mechanical work to drive their own evolution, taking inspiration from the adaptive immune…

Chemical affinities are responsible for driving active matter systems out of equilibrium. At the nano-scale, molecular machines interact with the surrounding environment and are subjected to external forces. The mechano-chemical coupling…

Ecologists have long argued about the strength of density dependence and population regulation, respectively defined as the short-term and long-term rates of return to equilibrium. Here, I give three arguments for the intractability of…

The incubation period of a disease is the time between an initiating pathologic event and the onset of symptoms. For typhoid fever, polio, measles, leukemia and many other diseases, the incubation period is highly variable. Some affected…

Measuring the statistical dependence between observed signals is a primary tool for scientific discovery. However, biological systems often exhibit complex non-linear interactions that currently cannot be captured without a priori knowledge…

Occurrence of strong or mass synchronization of a large number of neuronal populations in the brain characterizes its pathological states. In order to establish an understanding of the mechanism underlying such pathological synchronization…

Drug resistance is a serious public health problem that threatens to thwart our ability to treat many infectious diseases. Repeatedly, the introduction of new drugs has been followed by the evolution of resistance. In principle there are…

This paper proposes a model to explain the potential role of inter-group conflicts in determining the rise and fall of signaling norms. Individuals in a population are characterized by high and low productivity types and they are matched in…

It has been claimed that different types of causes must be considered in biological systems, including top-down as well as same-level and bottom-up causation, thus enabling the top levels to be causally efficacious in their own right. To…

We consider control of reaction and population systems by deterministically imposed transitions between the states with different numbers of particles or individuals. Even where the imposed transitions are significantly less frequent than…

Eukaryote genomes contain excessively introns, inter-genic and other non-genic sequences that appear to have no vital functional role or phenotype manifestation. Their existence, a long-standing puzzle, is viewed from the principle of…

We examine the dynamics of an age-structured population model in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of the parent. While the total population of the system always reaches a steady state, the…

Our understanding of risk preferences can be sharpened by considering their evolutionary basis. The existing literature has focused on two sources of risk: idiosyncratic risk and aggregate risk. We introduce a new source of risk, heritable…

The adaptive immune system relies on the diversity of receptors expressed on the surface of B and T-cells to protect the organism from a vast amount of pathogenic threats. The proliferation and degradation dynamics of different cell types…