Related papers: Physics of Computation and Behavior in Plants
Complex systems are often characterized by the interplay of multiple interconnected dynamical processes operating across a range of temporal scales. This phenomenon is widespread in both biological and artificial scenarios, making it…
Advances in synthetic biology allow us to engineer bacterial collectives with pre-specified characteristics. However, the behavior of these collectives is difficult to understand, as cellular growth and division as well as extra-cellular…
Regardless of a system's complexity or scale, its growth can be considered to be a spontaneous thermodynamic response to a local convergence of down-gradient material flows. Here it is shown how growth can be constrained to a few distinct…
Animals achieve sophisticated behavioral control through dynamic coupling of the brain, body, and environment. Accordingly, the co-design approach, in which both the controllers and the physical properties are optimized simultaneously, has…
Computation, mechanics and materials merge in biological systems, which can continually self-optimize through internal adaptivity across length scales, from cytoplasm and biofilms to animal herds. Recent interest in such material-based…
Scaling laws illuminate Nature's fundamental biological principles and guide bioinspired materials and structural designs. In simple cases they are based on the fundamental principle that all laws of nature remain unchanged (i.e.,…
We present a differentiable greenhouse simulation model based on physical processes whose parameters can be obtained by training from real data. The physics-based simulation model is fully interpretable and is able to do state prediction…
Neural activity fluctuates over a wide range of timescales within and across brain areas. Experimental observations suggest that diverse neural timescales reflect information in dynamic environments. However, how timescales are defined and…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
Adaptation in a fluctuating environment is a process of fueling environmental information to gain fitness. Living systems have gradually developed strategies for adaptation from random and passive diversification of the phenotype to more…
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…
What are the general principles that allow proper growth of a tissue or an organ? A growing leaf is an example of such a system: it increases its area by orders of magnitude, maintaining a proper (usually flat) shape. How can this be…
Despite recent developments in management theory, maintaining a manufacturing schedule remains difficult because of production delays and fluctuations in demand and supply of materials. The response of manufacturing systems to such…
The climate is a forced and dissipative nonlinear system featuring non-trivial dynamics of a vast range of spatial and temporal scales. The understanding of the climate's structural and multiscale properties is crucial for the provision of…
Many living organisms can exploit quantum mechanical effects to gain distinct biological advantages. In plants, photosynthesis uses quantum coherence to achieve near 100% efficiency in energy transfer. With advances in experimental…
The search for universal laws that help establish a relationship between dynamics and computation is driven by recent expansionist initiatives in biologically inspired computing. A general setting to understand both such dynamics and…
Cellular behavior is governed by gene regulatory processes that are intrinsically dynamic and nonlinear, and are subject to non-negligible amounts of random fluctuations. Such conditions are ubiquitous in physical systems, where they have…
Nutation is an oscillatory movement that plants display during their development. Despite its ubiquity among plants movements, the relation between the observed movement and the underlying biological mechanisms remains unclear. Here we show…
Structural causal models describe how the components of a robotic system interact. They provide both structural and functional information about the relationships that are present in the system. The structural information outlines the…
Plant-soil feedback is recognized as a causal mechanism for the emergence of vegetation patterns of the same species especially when water is not a limiting resource (e.g. humid environments). Nevertheless, in the field, plants rarely grow…