Related papers: Control across scales: signals, information, and a…
Life occurs in concentrated `Ringer Solutions' derived from seawater that Lesser Blum studied for most of his life. As we worked together, Lesser and I realized that the questions asked of those solutions were quite different in biology…
Soft and active condensed matter represent a class of fascinating materials that we encounter in our everyday lives -- and constitute life itself. Control signals interact with the dynamics of these systems, and this influence is formalized…
The current science of cities can provide a useful foundation for future urban policies, provided that these proposals have been validated by correct observations of the diversity of situations in the world. However, international…
Active sensing is traditionally defined as the expenditure of energy, typically in the form of movement, for obtaining information. Here, we propose that the combination of reliance on adaptive sensors, the linkage between movement and…
Mathematical and computational models can assist in gaining an understanding of cell behavior at many levels of organization. Here, we review models in the literature that focus on eukaryotic cell motility at 3 size scales: intracellular…
Many biological phenomena such as locomotion, circadian cycles, and breathing are rhythmic in nature and can be modeled as rhythmic dynamical systems. Dynamical systems modeling often involves neglecting certain characteristics of a…
In this Chapter, we ask questions (1) What is the right way to measure the quality of information processing in a biological system? and (2) What can real-life organisms do in order to improve their performance in information-processing…
One of the central aims of neuroscience is to reliably predict the behavioral response of an organism using its neural activity. If possible, this implies we can causally manipulate the neural response and design brain-computer-interface…
Efficient energy transduction is one driver of evolution; and thus understanding biomolecular energy transduction is crucial to understanding living organisms. As an energy-orientated modelling methodology, bond graphs provide a useful…
Plants solve complex problems without centralized control, relying instead on growth-driven dynamics to sense, navigate, and optimize resource acquisition. This review presents a unified physical framework for understanding plant behavior…
One of the basic frameworks in science views behavioral products as a process within a dynamic system. The mechanism might be seen as a representation of many instances of centralized control in real time. Many real systems, however,…
Statistical mechanics is one of the most powerful and elegant tools in the quantitative sciences. One key virtue of statistical mechanics is that it is designed to examine large systems with many interacting degrees of freedom, providing a…
Statistical mechanics provides a useful analog for understanding the behavior of complex adaptive systems, including power markets and the power systems they intend to govern. Transaction-based control is founded on the conjecture that the…
The need for high-throughput, precise, and meaningful methods for measuring behavior has been amplified by our recent successes in measuring and manipulating neural circuitry. The largest challenges associated with moving in this direction,…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
Many biological regulatory systems process signals out of steady state and respond with a physiological delay. A simple model of regulation which respects these features shows how the ability of a delayed output to transmit information is…
This paper is a preliminary work to address the problem of dynamical systems with parameters varying in time. An idea to predict their behaviour is proposed. These systems are called \emph{transient systems}, and are distinguished from…
Biological and robotic grasp and manipulation are undeniably similar at the level of mechanical task performance. However, their underlying fundamental biological vs. engineering mechanisms are, by definition, dramatically different and can…
Cognitive control is a suite of processes that helps individuals pursue goals despite resistance or uncertainty about what to do. Although cognitive control has been extensively studied as a dynamic feedback loop of perception, valuation,…
Active biological flow networks pervade nature and span a wide range of scales, from arterial blood vessels and bronchial mucus transport in humans to bacterial flow through porous media or plasmodial shuttle streaming in slime molds.…