Related papers: Charting dissipation across the microbial world
Cellular metabolism is globally regulated by various currency metabolites such as ATP, GTP, and NAD(P)H. These metabolites cycle between charged (high-energy) and uncharged (low-energy) states to mediate energy transfer. While distinct…
Living systems continuously transform matter and energy through the chemical processes that constitute their metabolism. The overall metabolic rate of an organism correlates positively with its body mass, however both the exact scaling…
A theoretical model of the formation of an amorphous phase during the quenching of a metallic melt is proposed. It has been shown that the appearance of a significant temperature gradient during the quenching of a metallic melt leads to…
Biological and engineered systems operate by coupling function to the transfer of heat and/or particles down a thermal or chemical gradient. In idealized \textit{deterministically} driven systems, thermodynamic control can be exerted…
Entropy generation in a chemical reaction is analyzed without using the general formalism of non-equilibrium thermodynamics at a level adequate for advanced undergraduates. In a first approach to the problem, the phenomenological kinetic…
Theoretical analysis, which maps single molecule time trajectories of a molecular motor onto unicyclic Markov processes, allows us to evaluate the heat dissipated from the motor and to elucidate its dependence on the mean velocity and…
Artificial micro heat engines are prototypical models to explore and elucidate the mechanisms of energy transduction in a regime that is dominated by fluctuations [1-2]. Micro heat engines realized hitherto mimicked their macroscopic…
The mixing of two different gases is one of the most common natural phenomena, with applications ranging from CO$_2$ capture to water purification. Traditionally, mixing is analyzed in the context of local thermal equilibrium, where systems…
Thermogenesis is a physiological activity of releasing heat that originates from intracellular biochemical reactions. Recent experimental studies discovered that externally applied heat changes intracellular signaling locally, resulting in…
The most important thermodynamic work performed by life today is the dissipation of the solar photon flux into heat through organic pigments in water. From this thermodynamic perspective, biological evolution is thus just the dispersal of…
Nonequilibrium processes break time-reversal symmetry and generate entropy. Living systems are driven out-of-equilibrium at the microscopic level of molecular motors that exploit chemical potential gradients to transduce free energy to…
Metabolic scaling is one of the most important patterns in biology. Theory explaining the 3/4-power size-scaling of biological metabolic rate does not predict the non-linear scaling observed for smaller life forms. Here we present a new…
With the discussion of three examples, we aim at clarifying the concept of energy transfer associated with dissipation in mechanics and in thermodynamics. The dissipation effects due to dissipative forces, such as the friction force between…
1. Strong and weak notions of erasure are distinguished according to whether the single erasure procedure does or does not leave the environment in the same state independently of the pre-erasure state. 2. Purely thermodynamic…
Social interaction between microbes can be described at many levels of details, ranging from the biochemistry of cell-cell interactions to the ecological dynamics of populations. Choosing the best level to model microbial communities…
Escherichia coli has long been used as a model organism due to the extensive experimental characterization of its pathways and molecular components. Take chemotaxis as an example, which allows bacteria to sense and swim in response to…
The history of the Earth has been marked by major ecological transitions, driven by metabolic innovation, that radically reshaped the composition of the oceans and atmosphere. The nature and magnitude of the earliest transitions, hundreds…
The principle of entropy increase is not only the basis of statistical mechanics, but also closely related to the irreversibility of time, the origin of life, chaos and turbulence. In this paper, we first discuss the dynamic system…
The concept of entropy in nonequilibrium macroscopic systems is investigated in the light of an extended equation of motion for the density matrix obtained in a previous study. It is found that a time-dependent information entropy can be…
The excess work required to drive a stochastic system out of thermodynamic equilibrium through a time-dependent external perturbation is directly related to the amount of entropy produced during the driving process, allowing excess work and…