相关论文: Are leaves optimally designed for self-support? An…

The models introduced in this paper describe a uniform distribution of plant stems competing for sunlight. The shape of each stem, and the density of leaves, are designed in order to maximize the captured sunlight, subject to a cost for…

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…

Photosynthesis is vital for the survival of entire ecosystems on Earth. While light is fundamental to this process, excessive exposure can be detrimental to plant cells. Chloroplasts, the photosynthetic organelles, actively move in response…

This paper is concerned with a shape optimization problem, where the functional to be maximized describes the total sunlight collected by a distribution of tree leaves, minus the cost for transporting water and nutrient from the base of the…

One might ask why is it important to know the mechanism of fracture in leaves when Mother Nature is doing her job perfectly. I could list the following reasons to address that question: (a) Leaves are natural composite structures, during…

Shape is one of the important characteristics for the structures observed in living organisms. Whereas biologists have proposed models where the shape is controlled on a molecular level [1], physicists, following Turing [2] and d'Arcy…

Plants have developed different tropisms: in particular, they re-orient the growth of their branches towards light (phototropism) or upwards (gravitropism). How these tropisms affect the shape of a tree crown remains unanswered. We address…

Plant aliveness is proven through laboratory experiments and special scientific instruments. In this paper, we aim to detect the degree of animation of plants based on the magnification of the small color changes in the plant's green leaves…

Lotus leaves floating on water usually experience short-wavelength edge wrinkling that decays toward the center, while the leaves growing above water normally morph into a global bending cone shape with long rippled waves near the edge.…

Counter-propagating light fields have the ability to create self-organized one-dimensional optically bound arrays of microscopic particles, where the light fields adapt to the particle locations and vice versa. We develop a theoretical…

Plants have developed intricate mechanisms to adapt to changing light conditions. Besides photo- and helio- tropism -- the differential growth towards light and the diurnal motion with respect to sunlight -- chloroplast motion acts as a…

Biology offers a boundless source of adaptation, innovation, and inspiration. A wide range of photosynthetic organisms exist that are capable of harvesting solar light in an exceptionally efficient way, using abundant and low-cost…

Growth pattern dynamics lie at the heart of morphogenesis. Here, we investigate the growth of plant leaves. We compute the conformal transformation that maps the contour of a leaf at a given stage onto the contour of the same leaf at a…

Self-assembly plays an essential role in many natural processes, involving the formation and evolution of living or non-living structures, and shows potential applications in many emerging domains. In existing research and practice, there…

The innumerable shapes of plant leaves present a challenge to the explanatory power of biophysical theory. A model is needed that can produce these shapes with a small set of parameters. This paper presents a simple model of leaf shape…

Growing a flat lamina such as a leaf is almost impossible without some feedback to stabilize long wavelength modes that are easy to trigger since they are energetically cheap. Here we combine the physics of thin elastic plates with feedback…

The human visual environment is comprised of different surfaces that are distributed in space. The parts of a scene that are visible at any one time are governed by the occlusion of overlapping objects. In this work we consider "dead…

Fireflies lighten up our warm summer evenings. There is more physic behind these little animals than anyone of us could imagine. In this paper we analyze from a physical point of view one structure found on the firefly lantern, the one…

In commercial fruit farming, managing the light distribution through canopies is important because the amount and distribution of solar energy that is harvested by each tree impacts the production of fruit quantity and quality. It is…

Self-healing of light refers to the ability of a light field to recover its structure after being damaged by a partial obstruction placed in its propagation path. Here, we will give a comprehensive review of the history and development of…