Related papers: Heatomics
The origin of life is often approached through the lens of replication, heredity, or molecular specificity. This paper proposes a thermodynamic framework in which the emergence of life is driven by the persistence of reaction pathways that…
Living organisms are inherently out-of-equilibrium systems. We employ new developments in stochastic energetics and rely on a minimal microscopic model to predict the amount of mechanical energy dissipated by such dynamics. Our model…
Continuous cultures of mammalian cells are complex systems displaying hallmark phenomena of nonlinear dynamics, such as multi-stability, hysteresis, as well as sharp transitions between different metabolic states. In this context…
The essential postulates of classical thermodynamics are formulated, from which the second law is deduced as the principle of increase of entropy in irreversible adiabatic processes that take one equilibrium state to another. The entropy…
The quest for life in the Universe is often affected by the free use of extrapolations of our phenomenological geocentric knowledge. We point out that the existence of a living organism, and a population of organisms, requires the existence…
The Semantic Theory of Evolution (STE) takes the existence of a number of arbitrary communication codes as a fundamental feature of life, from the genetic code to human cultural communication codes. Their arbitrariness enables, at each…
Biological systems perform an astonishing array of dynamical processes -- including development and repair, regulation, behavior and motor control, sensing and signaling, and adaptation, among others. Powered by the transduction of stored…
The conceptual difference between equilibrium and non-equilibrium steady state (NESS) is well established in physics and chemistry. This distinction, however, is not widely appreciated in dynamical descriptions of biological populations in…
Humans, like all organisms, are subject to fundamental biophysical laws. Van Valen predicted that, because of zero-sum dynamics, all populations of all species in a given environment flux the same amount of energy on average. Damuth's…
Biological systems often exhibit a heterogeneous arrangement of objects, such as assorted nuclear chromatin patterns in a tumor, assorted species of bacteria in biofilms, or assorted aggregates of subcellular particles. Principle Component…
The seesaw theory, the leading theory for particle interactions, provides a viable mechanism for generating the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe. Testing the leptogenesis mechanism directly requires measurement of the d=6…
We show that a neutral scalar field, \sigma, of two Higgs doublet extensions of the Standard Model incorporating the seesaw mechanism for neutrino masses can be identified as a consistent {\it warm} dark matter candidate with a mass of…
We study the internal dynamics of an elementary quantum system placed close to a body held at a temperature different from that of the surrounding radiation. We derive general expressions for lifetime and density matrix valid for bodies of…
Collections of self-propelled particles that move persistently by continuously consuming free energy are a paradigmatic example of active matter. In these systems, unlike Brownian "hot colloids", the breakdown of detailed balance yields a…
A living cell is an open, nonequilibrium biochemical system where ATP hydrolysis serves as the energy source for a wide range of intracellular processes, possibly including the assurance for decision-making. In the fission yeast cell cycle,…
Non-equilibrium states of a thermodynamic statistical system are investigated using the thermodynamic parameter of the system lifetime, first-passage time, the time before degeneration of the system under influence of fluctuations.…
What makes living things special is how they manage matter, energy, and entropy. A general theory of organismal metabolism should therefore be quantified in these three currencies while capturing the unique way they flow between individuals…
We quantify the amount of regulation required to control growth in living cells by a Maximum Entropy approach to the space of underlying metabolic states described by genome-scale models. Results obtained for E. coli and human cells are…
We propose the method of statistical description of broad class of dynamic systems (DS) whose equations of motion are determined by two state depending functions: 1) "energy" - the quantity which conserves in time and 2) "entropy" - the…
First-principles molecular dynamics simulation based on a plane wave/pseudopotential implementation of density functional theory is adopted to investigate atomic scale energy transport for semiconductors (silicon and germanium). By imposing…