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In the mammalian nervous system, various synaptic plasticity rules act, either individually or synergistically, and over wide-ranging timescales to dictate the processes that enable learning and memory formation. To mimic biological…
In this fluid dynamics video, we present the first time-resolved measurements of the oscillatory velocity field induced by swimming unicellular microorganisms. Confinement of the green alga C. reinhardtii in stabilized thin liquid films…
Understanding the collective actuation of microscopic structures driven by external fields can lead to the development of next-generation autonomous machines. With this goal in mind, we investigated light-induced collective motion of…
Cells maintain a stable size as they grow and divide. Inspired by the available experimental data, most proposed models for size homeostasis assume size control mechanisms that act on a timescale of one generation. Such mechanisms lead to…
Growth patterns generated by filamentous organisms (e.g. actinomycetes and fungi) involve spatial and temporal dynamics at different length scales. Several mathematical models have been proposed in the last thirty years to address these…
Chemotactic cells establish cell polarity in the absence of external guidance cues. Such self-organized polarity is induced by spontaneous symmetry breaking in the intracellular activities, which produces an emergent memory effect…
Chemotaxis plays a crucial role in a variety of processes in biology and ecology. Quite often it acts to improve efficiency of biological reactions. One example is the immune system signalling, where infected tissues release chemokines…
Organisms move through the world by changing their shape, and here we explore the mapping from shape space to movements in the nematode C. elegans as it crawls on a planar agar surface. We characterize the statistics of the trajectories…
Interaction of electromagnetic, acoustic and even gravitational waves with accelerating bodies forms a class of nonstationary time-variant processes. Scattered waves contain intrinsic signatures of motion, which manifest in a broad range of…
In the past decade the volvocine green algae, spanning from the unicellular $Chlamydomonas$ to multicellular $Volvox$, have emerged as model organisms for a number of problems in biological fluid dynamics. These include flagellar…
Chemotaxis plays a crucial role in a variety of processes in biology and ecology. Quite often it acts to improve efficiency of biological reactions; one example is the immune system signalling, where infected tissues release chemokines…
Habituation - a phenomenon in which a dynamical system exhibits a diminishing response to repeated stimulations that eventually recovers when the stimulus is withheld - is universally observed in living systems from animals to unicellular…
When light propagates through opaque material, the spatial information it holds becomes scrambled, but not necessarily lost. Two classes of techniques have emerged to recover this information: methods relying on optical memory effects, and…
The ocean is filled with microscopic microalgae called phytoplankton, which together are responsible for as much photosynthesis as all plants on land combined. Our ability to predict their response to the warming ocean relies on…
Inputs to signaling pathways can have complex statistics that depend on the environment and on the behavioral response to previous stimuli. Such behavioral feedback is particularly important in navigation. Successful navigation relies on…
Living organisms have to adjust to their surrounding in order to survive in stressful conditions. We study this mechanism in one of most primitive creatures - photosynthetic green sulfur bacteria. These bacteria absorb photons very…
Active systems across scales, ranging from molecular machines to human crowds, are usually modeled as assemblies of self-propelled particles driven by internally generated forces. However, these models often assume memoryless dynamics and…
Swarming of animal groups enthralls scientists in fields ranging from biology to physics to engineering. Complex swarming patterns often arise from simple interactions between individuals to the benefit of the collective whole. The…
In this paper we consider dynamics of a molecular system subjected to external pumping by a light source. Within a completely quantum mechanical treatment, we derive a general formula, which enables to asses effects of different light…
We address the question of optimization of the biomass long term productivity in the framework of microalgal biomass production in photobioreactors under the influence of day/night cycles. For that, we propose a simple bioreactor model…