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Many biological systems perform close to their physical limits, but promoting this optimality to a general principle seems to require implausibly fine tuning of parameters. Using examples from a wide range of systems, we show that this…
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…
Selection shapes all kinds of behaviors, including how we make decisions under uncertainty. The risk attitude reflected from it should be simple, flexible, yet consistent. In this paper we engaged evolutionary dynamics to find the decision…
An interesting feature of growth in animals is that different parts of the body grow at approximately the same rate. This property is called proportionate growth. In this paper, we review our recent work on patterns formed by adding $N$…
The concept of fitness is introduced, and a simple derivation of the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection (which states that the average fitness of a population increases if its variance is nonzero) is given. After a short discussion of…
Eating behaviors among a large population of children are studied as a dynamic process driven by nonlinear interactions in the sociocultural school environment. The impact of food association learning on diet dynamics, inspired by a pilot…
An imbalance between energy intake and energy expenditure will lead to a change in body weight (mass) and body composition (fat and lean masses). A quantitative understanding of the processes involved, which currently remains lacking, will…
Image-based dietary assessment refers to the process of determining what someone eats and how much energy and nutrients are consumed from visual data. Food classification is the first and most crucial step. Existing methods focus on…
We propose information-directed sampling -- a new approach to online optimization problems in which a decision-maker must balance between exploration and exploitation while learning from partial feedback. Each action is sampled in a manner…
Scale-free foraging patterns are widespread among animals. These may be the outcome of an optimal searching strategy to find scarce randomly distributed resources, but a less explored alternative is that this behaviour may result from the…
Humankind has spread worldwide supported by cultural and technological knowledge, but the environmental sustainability on the human niche evolution depends on a new human beings relationship with the biosphere. Human lifestyles nowadays are…
By retracing my scientific journey that began 20 years ago, I highlight in this thesis the need to consider the organization of the brain, which is certainly globally hierarchical, but also highly distributed and mixed in the neuronal…
Through documentary research and interviews with nutrition experts, we found that all nutrients have two thresholds, the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) and the Tolerable Upper Intake Level (UL). Intake less than the RDA or more than the…
Genetic information and environmental factors determine the path of an individuals life and therefore, the evolution of its entire species. We have succeeded in proposing and studying a model that captures this idea. In our model, a…
This book chapter introduces to the problem to which extent search strategies of foraging biological organisms can be identified by statistical data analysis and mathematical modeling. A famous paradigm in this field is the Levy Flight…
With exponential growth in the human population, it is vital to conserve natural resources without compromising on producing enough food to feed everyone. Doing so can improve people's livelihoods, health, and ecosystems for the present and…
Fruit is a key crop in worldwide agriculture feeding millions of people. The standard supply chain of fruit products involves quality checks to guarantee freshness, taste, and, most of all, safety. An important factor that determines fruit…
We demonstrate with a thought experiment that fitness-based population dynamical approaches to evolution are not able to make quantitative, falsifiable predictions about the long-term behavior of evolutionary systems. A key characteristic…
Theoretical physicists have been fascinated by the phenomena of life for more than a century. As we engage with more realistic descriptions of living systems, however, things get complicated. After reviewing different reactions to this…
It has been argued that the limited set of proteins used by life as we know it could not have arisen by the process of Darwinian selection from all possible proteins. This probabilistic argument has a number of implicit assumptions that may…