Related papers: Integrating Evolutionary Biology into Physics Clas…
Theoretical understanding of evolutionary dynamics in spatially structured populations often relies on non-spatial models. Biofilms are among such populations where a more accurate understanding is of theoretical interest and can reveal new…
Intracellular protein patterns regulate many vital cellular functions, such as the processing of spatiotemporal information or the control of shape deformations. To do so, pattern-forming systems can be sensitive to the cell geometry by…
Physicists face major challenges in modelling multi-scale phenomena that are observed in geophysical flows (e.g. in the Earth's oceans and atmosphere, or liquid planetary cores). In particular, complexities arise because geophysical fluids…
Dispersal is a well recognized driver of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and simultaneously an evolving trait. Dispersal evolution has traditionally been studied in single-species metapopulations so that it remains unclear how…
Equations are about more than computing physical quantities or constructing formal models; they are also about understanding. The conceptual systems physicists use to think about nature are made from many different resources, formal and…
Advances in science and engineering often reveal the limitations of classical approaches initially used to understand, predict, and control phenomena. With progress, conceptual categories must often be re-evaluated to better track recently…
In teaching the physical sciences, a significant challenge lies in the student's tendency to consider the scientific world and the "real" world as separate. For example, Newton's 1st Law of Motion states that an object in motion remains in…
Till now, the foundation of quantum physics is still mysterious. To explore the mysteries in the foundation of quantum physics, people always take it for granted that quantum processes must be some types of fields/objects on a rigid space.…
We present results of a long-term team collaboration of mathematicians and biologists. We focus on building a mathematical framework for the shape space constituted by a collection of homologous bones or teeth from many species. The…
The evolution of a large class of biological, physical and engineering systems can be studied through both dynamical systems theory and Hamiltonian mechanics. The former theory, in particular its specialization to study systems with…
This article proposes and discusses qualitatively the use of a didactic board game in Science Education for high school students. The game contemplates in an interdisciplinary way the areas of Physics, Biology, Chemistry and Astronomy and…
We introduce a new geometric framework for relativistic particle dynamics based on contact geometry and suitable for treating dissipative processes like particle decay. The dynamics is formulated on a nine--dimensional extended phase space…
In response to increasing calls for the reform of the undergraduate science curriculum for life science majors and pre-medical students (Bio2010, Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians, Vision & Change), an interdisciplinary team has…
The protein folding problem must ultimately be solved on all length scales from the atomic up through a hierarchy of complicated structures. By analyzing the stability of the folding process using physics and mathematics, this paper shows…
Understanding how growth induces form is a longstanding biological question. Many studies concentrated on the shapes of plant cells, fungi or bacteria. Some others have shown the importance of the mechanical properties of bacterial walls…
Life is characterized by a myriad of complex dynamic processes allowing organisms to grow, reproduce, and evolve. Physical approaches for describing systems out of thermodynamic equilibrium have been increasingly applied to living systems,…
We derive exact expressions for the scalar and electromagnetic self-forces and self-torques acting on arbitrary static extended bodies in arbitrary static spacetimes with any number of dimensions. Non-perturbatively, our results are…
As Physics did in previous centuries, there is currently a common dream of extracting generic laws of nature in economics, sociology, neuroscience, by focalising the description of phenomena to a minimal set of variables and parameters,…
The Darwinian paradigm of biological evolution is based on the separability of the variation and selection processes. As a result, the population thinking had always been an integral part of the Darwinian approach. I propose an alternative…
The problem of error growth due to the incomplete knowledge of the evolution law which rules the dynamics of a given physical system is addressed. Major interest is devoted to the analysis of error amplification in systems with many…