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In group foraging situations, the conventional expectation is that increased food availability would enhance consumption, especially when animals prioritize maximizing their food intake. This paper challenges this conventional wisdom by…
The least-cost diet problem introduces students to optimization and linear programming, using the health consequences of food choice. We provide a graphical example, Excel workbook and Word template using actual data on item prices, food…
The growth rate of organisms depends both on external conditions and on internal states, such as the expression levels of various genes. We show that to achieve a criterion mean growth rate over an ensemble of conditions, the internal…
A major problem in evolutionary biology is how species learn and adapt under the constraint of environmental conditions and competition of other species. Models of cyclic dominance provide simplified settings in which such questions can be…
Background: People's health depends on the use of proper diet as an important factor. Today, with the increasing mechanization of people's lives, proper eating habits and behaviors are neglected. On the other hand, food recommendations in…
Body size drives the energetic demands of organisms, constraining trophic interactions between species and playing a significant role in shaping the feasibility of species' populations in a community. On macroevolutionary timescales, these…
The question what determines the structure of natural food webs has been listed among the nine most important unanswered questions in ecology. It arises naturally from many problems related to ecosystem stability and resilience. The…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
Large-scale food fortification (LSFF) is a widely accepted intervention to alleviate micronutrient deficiencies, yet policy implementation is often incomplete and its effects on diet costs are not well established. We estimated the extent…
Background: Higher endogenous testosterone levels are associated with reduced chronic disease risk and mortality. Since the mid-20th century, there have been significant changes in dietary patterns, and men's testosterone levels have…
Phylogenetic trees represent certain species and their likely ancestors. In such a tree, present-day species are leaves and an edge from u to v indicates that u is an ancestor of v. Weights on these edges indicate the phylogenetic distance.…
A growing proportion of the global population is becoming overweight or obese, leading to various diseases (e.g., diabetes, ischemic heart disease and even cancer) due to unhealthy eating patterns, such as increased intake of food with high…
There has been some confusion concerning the animal group-size: an exponential distribution was deduced by maximizing the entropy; lognormal distributions were practically used; a power-law decay with exponent {3/2} was proposed in physical…
Empirical observations indicate striking similarities among locomotion in terrestrial animals, birds, and fish, but unifying physical grounds are lacking. When applied to efficient locomotion, the analytical mechanics principle of minimum…
Nutritional regulation by ants emerges from a distributed process: food is collected by a small fraction of workers, stored within the crops of individuals, and spreads via local ant-to-ant interactions. The precise individual level…
Factors that mediate ethanol preference in Drosophila melanogaster are not well understood. A major confound has been the use of diverse methods to estimate ethanol consumption. We measured fly consumptive ethanol preference on base diets…
We study an optimal control problem arising from a resource allocation problem in cellular metabolism. A minimalistic model that describes the production of enzymatic vs. non-enzymatic biomass components from a single nutrient source is…
We consider the problem of learning optimal solutions of a partially known linear optimization problem and recovering its underlying cost function where a set of past decisions and the feasible set are known. We develop a new framework,…
The Free Lunch Principle: Nature thrives on freebies. She chooses nothing, and no one helps Her. She must use canonical mathematical structures as there is no one to tell Her otherwise. With this I show where variational principles are…
We consider a three-level food chain in which an epidemics affects the intermediate population. Two models are presented, respectively either allowing for unlimited food supply for the bottom prey, or instead assuming for it a logistic…