相关论文: On the origin of order

In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…

We propose a minimal off-lattice model of living organisms where just a very few dynamical rules of growth are assumed. The stable coexistence of many clusters is detected when we replace the global restriction rule by a locally applied…

Collective cell migration contributes to embryogenesis, wound healing and tumor metastasis. Cell monolayer migration experiments help understanding what determines the movement of cells far from the leading edge. Inhibiting cell…

The success of the Higgs mechanism in the standard model has led to the speculation that the standard model gauge group might arise through an analogous breaking of a yet more unified group. Such `grand unified theories' have the advantage…

The physics of disordered media, from metallic glasses to colloidal suspensions, granular matter and biological tissues, offers difficult challenges because it often occurs far from equilibrium, in materials lacking symmetries and evolving…

Flocking, as paradigmatically exemplified by birds, is the coherent collective motion of active agents. As originally conceived, flocking emerges through alignment interactions between the agents. Here, we report that flocking can also…

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.…

Spontaneous directed motion, a hallmark of cell biology, is unusual in classical statistical physics. Here we study, using both numerical and analytical methods, organized motion in models of the cytoskeleton in which constituents are…

Understanding the way disordered particle packings transition between jammed (rigid) and unjammed (fluid) states is of both great practical importance and strong fundamental interest. The values of critical packing fraction (and other state…

There are rich emergent phase behaviors in non-equilibrium active systems. Flocking and clustering are two representative dynamic phases. The relationship between these two phases is still unclear. In the paper, we numerically investigate…

The incubation period of a disease is the time between an initiating pathologic event and the onset of symptoms. For typhoid fever, polio, measles, leukemia and many other diseases, the incubation period is highly variable. Some affected…

During metastatic dissemination, streams of cells collectively migrate through a network of narrow channels within the extracellular matrix, before entering into the blood stream. This strategy is believed to outperform other migration…

A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…

Self-organization, and transitions from reversible to irreversible behaviour, of interacting particle assemblies driven by externally imposed stresses or deformation is of interest in comprehending diverse phenomena in soft matter. They…

Living organisms process information to interact and adapt to their changing environment with the goal of finding food, mates or averting hazards. The structure of their niche has profound repercussions by both selecting their internal…

Selection is central to biological evolution, yet there has been no general experimental framework for quantifying selection in chemical systems before life. Here we demonstrate that selection in a prebiological chemical system can be…

Critical transitions are observed in many complex systems. This includes the onset of synchronization in a network of coupled oscillators or the emergence an epidemic state within a population. "Explosive" first-order transitions have…

Motivated by recent experiments on growing fibroblasts, we examine the development of nematic order in a colony of elongated cells proliferating on a nematic elastomer substrate. After sparse seeding, the cells divide and grow into locally…

Natural phenomena frequently involve a very large number of interacting molecules moving in confined regions of space. Cellular transport by motor proteins is an example of such collective behavior. We derive a deterministic compartmental…

According to the universally accepted concept of the development of life on the Earth, multicellular organisms initially emerged as a result of either the union of identical unicellular organisms with the following functional…