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Environmental sensors provide crucial data for understanding our surroundings. For example, air quality maps based on sensor readings help users make decisions to mitigate the effects of pollution on their health. Standard maps show…
Humans and other animals base their decisions on noisy sensory input. Much work has therefore been devoted to understanding the computations that underly such decisions. The problem has been studied in a variety of tasks and with stimuli of…
Biochemical reaction networks in living cells usually involve reversible covalent modification of signaling molecules, such as protein phosphorylation. Under conditions of small molecule numbers, as is frequently the case in living cells,…
Agents acting in the natural world aim at selecting appropriate actions based on noisy and partial sensory observations. Many behaviors leading to decision mak- ing and action selection in a closed loop setting are naturally phrased within…
Wet-lab experiments, in which the dynamics within living cells are observed, are usually costly and time consuming. This is particularly true if single-cell measurements are obtained using experimental techniques such as flow-cytometry or…
Recent advances in electronics are enabling substantial processing to be performed at each node (robots, sensors) of a networked system. Local processing enables data compression and may mitigate measurement noise, but it is still slower…
Microbes require several complex organic molecules for growth. A species may obtain a required factor by taking up molecules released by other species or by synthesizing the molecule. The patterns of uptake and synthesis set a flow of…
We study the effect of memory on synchronization of identical chaotic systems driven by common external noises. Our examples show that while in general synchronization transition becomes more difficult to meet when memory range increases,…
The auditory and vestibular systems exhibit remarkable sensitivity of detection, responding to deflections on the order of Angstroms, even in the presence of biological noise. Further, these complex systems exhibit high temporal acuity and…
Transport phenomena are ubiquitous throughout the science, engineering and technology disciplines as it concerns energy, mass, charge and information exchange between systems. In particular, energy transport in the nanoscale regime has…
Using mathematical models to assist in the interpretation of experiments is becoming increasingly important in research across applied mathematics, and in particular in biology and ecology. In this context, accurate parameter estimation is…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
Structure, composition and stability of ecological populations are shaped by the inter- and intra-species interactions within these communities. It remains to be fully understood how the interplay of these interactions with other factors,…
In biology and ecology, individuals or communities of individuals living in unpredictable environments often alternate between different evolutionary strategies to spread and reduce risks. Such behavior is commonly referred to as…
Biomolecular condensates form on timescales of seconds in cells upon environmental or compositional changes. Condensate formation is thus argued to act as a mechanism for sensing such changes and quickly initiating downstream processes,…
Rank-order coding, a form of temporal coding, has emerged as a promising scheme to explain the rapid ability of the mammalian brain. Owing to its speed as well as efficiency, rank-order coding is increasingly gaining interest in diverse…
In a constantly changing world, animals must account for environmental volatility when making decisions. To appropriately discount older, irrelevant information, they need to learn the rate at which the environment changes. We develop an…
Cells in natural environments like tissue or soil sense and respond to extracellular ligands with intricately structured and non-monotonic spatial distributions that are sculpted by processes such as fluid flow and substrate adhesion.…
Various microorganisms and some mammalian cells are able to swim in viscous fluids by performing nonreciprocal body deformations, such as rotating attached flagella or by distorting their entire body. In order to perform chemotaxis, i.e. to…
Living systems such as neuronal networks and animal groups process information about their environment via the dynamics of interacting units. These can transition between distinct macroscopic behaviors. Near such a transition (or critical…