Related papers: Natural Intelligence: the information processing p…
The biological immune system is a robust, complex, adaptive system that defends the body from foreign pathogens. It is able to categorize all cells (or molecules) within the body as self or non-self substances. It does this with the help of…
The process of evolution by natural selection leads to phenotypes of increasing fitness. For cellular chemical reaction networks, this means optimising a variety of fitness functions such as robustness, precision, or sensitivity to external…
In a cell or microorganism the processes that generate mass, energy, information transfer, and cell fate specification are seamlessly integrated through a complex network of various cellular constituents and reactions. However, despite the…
Life is a complex biological phenomenon represented by numerous chemical, physical and biological processes performed by a biothermodynamic system/cell/organism. Both living organisms and inanimate objects are subject to aging, a biological…
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…
In the last few decades or so, we witness a paradigm shift in our nature studies - from a data-processing based computational approach to an information-processing based cognitive approach. The process is restricted and often misguided by…
Neurons, as eukaryotic cells, have powerful internal computation capabilities. One neuron can have many distinct states, and brains can use this capability. Processes of neuron growth and maintenance use chemical signalling between cell…
Biologically-inspired methods such as evolutionary algorithms and neural networks are proving useful in the field of information fusion. Artificial Immune Systems (AISs) are a biologically-inspired approach which take inspiration from the…
A method of discovering how neurons are connected to process information is presented here: Design a simple logic circuit that can perform a single, biologically advantageous function. Engineering concepts can be helpful in choosing the…
Computation, if treated as a set of physical processes that act on information represented by states of matter, encompasses biological systems, digital systems, and other constructs, and may be a fundamental measure of living systems. The…
All natural things process and transform information. They receive environmental information as input, and transform it into appropriate output responses. Much of science is dedicated to building models of such systems -- algorithmic…
Intelligence can be defined as a predominantly human ability to accomplish tasks that are generally hard for computers and animals. Artificial Intelligence [AI] is a field attempting to accomplish such tasks with computers. AI is becoming…
Many of life's most fascinating phenomena emerge from interactions among many elements--many amino acids determine the structure of a single protein, many genes determine the fate of a cell, many neurons are involved in shaping our thoughts…
The yearly global production of data is growing exponentially, outpacing the capacity of existing storage media, such as tape and disk, and surpassing our ability to store it. DNA storage - the representation of arbitrary information as…
Biological molecules, like all active matter, use free energy to generate force and motion which drive them out of thermal equilibrium, and undergo inherent dynamic interconversion between metastable free energy states separated by levels…
Living systems, from single cells to higher vertebrates, receive a continuous stream of non-stationary inputs that they sense, e.g., via cell surface receptors or sensory organs. Integrating these time-varying, multi-sensory, and often…
The brain is a highly efficient system evolved to achieve high performance with limited resources. We propose that dendrites make information processing and storage in the brain more efficient through the segregation of inputs and their…
The human brain processes a wide variety of inputs and does so either consciously or subconsciously. According to the Global Workspace theory, conscious processing involves broadcasting of information to several regions of the brain and…
As a result of a hundred million years of evolution, living animals have adapted extremely well to their ecological niche. Such adaptation implies species-specific interactions with their immediate environment by processing sensory cues and…
Molecular motors fulfill critical functions within all living beings. Understanding their underlying working principles is therefore of great interest. Here we develop a simple model inspired by the two-component biomolecular motor Fo-F1…