相关论文: 'Genesis': A takeover from field-responsive matter…

It is becoming widely accepted that very early in the origin of life, even before the emergence of genetic encoding, reaction networks of diverse small chemicals might have manifested key properties of life, namely self-propagation and…

Many of life's most fascinating phenomena emerge from interactions among many elements--many amino acids determine the structure of a single protein, many genes determine the fate of a cell, many neurons are involved in shaping our thoughts…

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…

Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…

Statistical physics provides a useful perspective for the analysis of many complex systems; it allows us to relate microscopic fluctuations to macroscopic observations. Developmental biology, but also cell biology more generally, are…

The history of the Earth has been marked by major ecological transitions, driven by metabolic innovation, that radically reshaped the composition of the oceans and atmosphere. The nature and magnitude of the earliest transitions, hundreds…

Transposable elements are DNA sequences that can move around to different positions in the genome. During this process, they can cause mutations, and lead to an increase in genome size. Despite representing a large genomic fraction,…

We give a detailed description of electrodynamics as an emergent theory from condensed-matter-like structures, not only {\it per se} but also as a warm-up for the study of the much more complex case of gravity. We will concentrate on two…

This thesis is about the study of complex systems through simple models. Our work evidences the relevance of this kind of modeling in science, which provides us with a better understanding of nature at minimum cost. The fundamentals tools…

Evolutionary dynamics is often viewed as a subtle process of change accumulation that causes a divergence among organisms and their genomes. However, this interpretation is an inheritance of a gradualistic view that has been challenged at…

Assuming a large-scale homogeneous magnetic field, we follow the covariant and gauge-invariant approach used by Tsagas and Barrow to describe the evolution of density and magnetic field inhomogeneities and curvature perturbations in a…

The Anthropocene is characterized by close interdependencies between the natural Earth system and the human society, posing novel challenges to model development. Here we present a conceptual model describing the long-term coevolution of…

A rich variety of brane cosmologies is obtained once one allows for energy exchange between the brane and the bulk, depending on the precise form of energy transfer, on the equation of state of matter on the brane and on the spatial…

A review is given on some recent developments in the theory of the Ising model in a random field. This model is a good representation of a large number of impure materials. After a short repetition of earlier arguments, which prove the…

P.W. Anderson proposed the concept of complexity in order to describe the emergence and growth of macroscopic collective patterns out of the simple interactions of many microscopic agents. In the physical sciences this paradigm was…

We formally characterize a set of causality-based properties of metabolic networks. This set of properties aims at making precise several notions on the production of metabolites, which are familiar in the biologists' terminology. From a…

We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…

The concept of evolutionary development of structures constituted a \emph{real} revolution in biology: it was possible to understand how the very complex structures of life can arise in an out-of-equilibrium system. The investigation of…

Ecological modelling of increasingly more complex microbial populations is necessary to reflect the highly functional and diverse behaviour inherent to many systems found in reality. Anaerobic digestion is one such process that has…

According to the "hard-steps" model, the origin of humanity required "successful passage through a number of intermediate steps" (so-called "hard" or "critical" steps) that were intrinsically improbable with respect to the total time…