Related papers: Size and shape of terrestrial animals
Darwin introduced the concept of the "living fossil" to describe species belonging to lineages that have experienced little evolutionary change, and suggested that species in more slowly evolving lineages are more prone to extinction (1).…
The body plan of the fruit fly is determined by the expression of just a handful of genes. We show that the spatial patterns of expression for several of these genes scale precisely with the size of the embryo. Concretely, discrete…
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…
One way of controlling friction and associated energy losses is to engineer a deterministic structural pattern on the surface of the rubbing parts (i.e., texture engineering). Custom texturing enhances the quality of lubrication, reduces…
We study the limiting behaviors of a generalized elephant random walk on the integer lattice. This random walk is defined by using two sequences of parameters expressing the memory at each step from the whole past and the drift of each step…
Background: Recent research in animal behaviour has contributed to determine how alignment, turning responses, and changes of speed mediate flocking and schooling interactions in different animal species. Here, we address specifically the…
Responding mechanically to environmental requests, muscles show a surprisingly large variety of functions. The studies of in vivo cycling muscles qualified skeletal muscles into four principal locomotor patterns: motor, brake, strut, and…
Salamanders (urodela) have among the largest vertebrate genomes, ranging in size from 10 to over 80 pg. The urodela are divided into ten extant families each with a characteristic range in genome size. Although changes in genome size often…
The protein folding problem has attracted an increasing attention from physicists. The problem has a flavor of statistical mechanics, but possesses the most common feature of most biological problems -- the profound effects of evolution. I…
We consider in this article an Elephant Random Walk evolving in the plane. Specifically, this is a reinforced stochastic process in which the $n$th step is given by a random rotation of one of the previous steps chosen uniformly at random.…
Scale invariance property in the global geometry of Earth may lead to a coupled interactive behaviour between various components of the climate system. One of the most interesting correlations exists between spatial statistics of the global…
Snakes can move through almost any terrain. Although their locomotion on flat surfaces using planar gaits is inherently stable, when snakes deform their body out of plane to traverse complex terrain, maintaining stability becomes a…
On average men are taller and more muscular than women, which confers on them advantages related to female choice and during physical competition with other men. Sexual size dimorphisms such as these come with vulnerabilities due to higher…
Fitness consequence of dispersal depends on property of the entire landscape, which patches are available and what are the cost of moving. These are information that are not available locally when an organism make the decision to disperse.…
With a view to connecting random mutation on the molecular level to punctuated equilibrium behavior on the phenotype level, we propose a new model for biological evolution, which incorporates random mutation and natural selection. In this…
The regularity of ecosystem size spectra is one of the most intriguing and relevant phenomena on our planet. Pelagic size spectra generally show a log-linearly downtrending shape, following a power-law distribution. A constant log-linear…
We study the spatial patterns formed by a system of interacting particles where the mobility of any individual is determined by the population crowding at two different spatial scales. In this way we model the behavior of some biological…
Animals are capable of precise and agile locomotion using vision. Replicating this ability has been a long-standing goal in robotics. The traditional approach has been to decompose this problem into elevation mapping and foothold planning…
Stability of bipedal systems in frontal plane is affected by the hip offset, to the extent that adjusting stride time using feedforward retraction and extension of the legs can lead to stable oscillations without feedback control. This…
The growth and scaling of organs is a fundamental aspect of animal development. However, how organs grow to the right size and shape required by physiological demands, remains largely unknown. Here, we provide a framework combining theory…