Related papers: Heatomics
Biological membranes and vesicles play a central role in living systems, forming dynamic interfaces that regulate cellular organization and function. Classical descriptions of membrane mechanics that are rooted in equilibrium statistical…
Generalization through novel interpretations of the inner logic of the century-old Gibbs' statistical thermodynamics is presented: i) Identifying $k_B\to 0$ as classical energetics, one directly derives a pair of thermodynamic variational…
Chemically active droplets provide simple models for cell-like systems that can grow and divide. Such active droplet systems are driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium and turn over chemically, which corresponds to a simple metabolism.…
We seek here to unify the second law of thermodynamics with the other laws, or at least to put up a law behind the second law of thermodynamics. Assuming no fine tuning, concretely by a random Hamiltonian, we argue just from equations of…
Living cells use readout molecules to record the state of receptor proteins, similar to measurements or copies in typical computational devices. But is this analogy rigorous? Can cells be optimally efficient, and if not, why? We show that,…
The primordial confrontation underlying the existence of our universe can be conceived as the battle between entropy and complexity. The law of ever-increasing entropy (Boltzmann H-theorem) evokes an irreversible, one-directional evolution…
Steady-state thermodynamics (SST) is a relatively newly emerging subfield of physics, which deals with transitions between steady states. In this paper, we find an SST-like structure in population dynamics of organisms that can sense their…
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…
Life is characterized by a myriad of complex dynamic processes allowing organisms to grow, reproduce, and evolve. Physical approaches for describing systems out of thermodynamic equilibrium have been increasingly applied to living systems,…
Early recordings of nervous conduction revealed a notable thermal signature associated with the electrical signal. The observed production and subsequent absorption of heat arise from physicochemical processes that occur at the cell…
Self-replication is a capacity common to every species of living thing, and simple physical intuition dictates that such a process must invariably be fueled by the production of entropy. Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous…
The glassy cytoplasm, crowded with bio-macromolecules, is fluidized in living cells by mechanical energy derived from metabolism. Characterizing the living cytoplasm as a non-equilibrium system is crucial in elucidating the intricate…
A dynamic model for cell differentiation is studied, where cells with internal chemical reaction dynamics interact with each other and replicate. It leads to spontaneous differentiation of cells and determination, as is discussed in the…
We discuss the physical basis of the statistical mechanics of self-gravitating systems. We show the correspondance between statistical mechanics methods based on the evaluation of the density of states and partition function and…
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…
Nearly all cell models explicitly or implicitly deal with the biophysical constraints that must be respected for life to persist. Despite this, there is almost no systematicity in how these constraints are implemented, and we lack a…
Quantum processes have been confirmed for various biological phenomena. Here we model a quantum process in cells based on coherent waves of established ultrafast energy transfers in water. We compute wave speed, ~156 km/s, and wavelength,…
Cells generally convert external nutrient resources to support metabolismand growth. Understanding the thermodynamic efficiency of this conversion is essential to determine the general characteristics of cellular growth. Using a simple…
Substantial grounds exist to doubt the universal validity of the Newtonian Paradigm that requires a pre-stated, fixed phase space. Therefore, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, stated only for fixed phase spaces, is also in doubt. The…
The population dynamics and stability of ecosystems of interacting species is studied from the perspective of non-equilibrium thermodynamics by assuming that species, through their biotic and abiotic interactions, are units of entropy…