相关论文: Unexpected trends in termite survival

Throughout the animal kingdom, animals frequently benefit from living in groups. Models of collective behaviour show that simple local interactions are sufficient to generate group morphologies found in nature (swarms, flocks and mills).…

Termites, like many social insects, build nests of complex architecture. These constructions have been proposed to optimize different structural features. Here we describe the nest network of the termite Nasutitermes ephratae, which is…

We propose a mathematical model for collective sensing in a population growing in a stochastically varying environment. In the population, individuals use an information channel for sensing the environment, and two channels for signal…

Many systems in nature, from ferromagnets to flocks of birds, exhibit ordering phenomena on the large scale. In physical systems order is statistically robust for large enough dimensions, with relative fluctuations due to noise vanishing…

Swarming or collective motion of living entities is one of the most common and spectacular manifestations of living systems having been extensively studied in recent years. A number of general principles have been established. The…

Sensory mechanisms in biology, from cells to humans, have the property of adaptivity, whereby the response produced by the sensor is adapted to the overall amplitude of the signal; reducing the sensitivity in the presence of strong…

Social structure affects the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. Here we study the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in fragmented societies, and show that conjoining segregated cooperation-inhibiting groups, if done properly,…

A model has been proposed to simulate the evolution of interpersonal relationships in a social group. The small social community is simply assumed as an undirected and weighted graph, where individuals are denoted by vertices, and the…

Cooperation among unrelated individuals is frequently observed in social groups when their members combine efforts and resources to obtain a shared benefit that is unachievable by an individual alone. However, understanding why cooperation…

According to the criticality hypothesis, collective biological systems should operate in a special parameter region, close to so-called critical points, where the collective behavior undergoes a qualitative change between different…

Natural flocks (aligned) and swarms (non-aligned) both exhibit features of near-criticality, challenging their treatment as two ends of the same phase transition. We present a model for the aggregation of active individuals, in which their…

Community assembly is studied using individual-based multispecies models. The models have stochastic population dynamics with mutation, migration, and extinction of species. Mutants appear as a result of mutation of the resident species,…

Individuals within any species exhibit differences in size, developmental state, or spatial location. These differences coupled with environmental fluctuations in demographic rates can have subtle effects on population persistence and…

The emerging collective motions of swarms of interacting agents are a subject of great interest in application areas ranging from biology to physics and robotics. In this paper, we conduct a careful analysis of the collective dynamics of a…

In nature, bacterial collectives typically consist of multiple species, which are interacting both biochemically and physically. Nonetheless, past studies on the physical properties of swarming bacteria were focused on axenic (single…

Groups of cells, including clusters of cancerous cells, multicellular organisms, and developing organs, may both grow and break apart. What physical factors control these fractures? In these processes, what sets the eventual size of…

We study the effect of correlations in generation times on the dynamics of population growth of microorganisms. We show that any non-zero correlation that is due to cell-size regulation, no matter how small, induces long-term oscillations…

Microbes providing public goods are widespread in nature despite running the risk of being exploited by free-riders. However, the precise ecological factors supporting cooperation are still puzzling. Following recent experiments, we…

How does the size of a swarm affect its collective action? Despite being arguably a key parameter, no systematic and satisfactory guiding principles exist to select the number of units required for a given task and environment. Even when…

The timing patterns of human communication in social networks is not random. On the contrary, communication is dominated by emergent statistical laws such as non-trivial correlations and clustering. Recently, we found long-term correlations…