Showing papers in "Physics of Life Reviews in 2006"

TL;DR: In this paper, a mathematical approach to modeling the mind has been reviewed, including artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, and neural networks, and the fundamental inconsistency of logic discovered by Godel.

TL;DR: It is shown that ant societies display some properties which are usually considered in physico-chemical systems, as typical signatures of self-organization, and details the key role played by feed-back loops, fluctuations, number of interacting units and sensitivity to environmental factors in the emergence of a structured collective behaviour.

TL;DR: The feasibility of interpreting neurophysiological data in the context of many-body physics is explored by using tools that physicists have devised to analyze comparable hierarchies in other fields of science using concepts of energy dissipation, the maintenance by cortex of multiple ground states corresponding to AM patterns, and the exclusive selection by spontaneous breakdown of symmetry of single states in sequential phase transitions.

TL;DR: Care should be taken not to use the term “self-organization” erroneously to refer to low-informational, natural-process, self-ordering events, especially when discussing genetic information.

TL;DR: This work presents a critical discussion of the theoretical models proposed to explain the scaling of metabolic rates, and compares the predicted exponents with a review of the experimental literature to develop a unified theory for the common origin of the allometric scaling laws of metabolism.

TL;DR: The principle of rectified thermal diffusion has recently received a great support from the single-molecule studies as discussed by the authors, and a few specific motor systems are considered to illustrate the general principle.

TL;DR: A historical review of this subject is made, summarizing the main experimental papers as well as discussing the main theoretical proposals, to elucidate several aspects of mammalian limb-bone scaling.

TL;DR: In this paper, the spectral diffusion physics of proteins at low temperature are discussed, i.e. their motion in conformational phase space, and how this motion is reflected in the optical spectra.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide a broad overview of the role of noise and basic methods to describe noise effects in biological systems, and a strong emphasis is put on "fluctuation-dissipation" relations, relations between the irregular fluctuations and the dissipative spreading of energy towards a most probable distribution.

TL;DR: The nature of the probable earliest catalysts in the RNA world is presented and it is speculated that the main reason for the emergence of co-operative oligomeric enzymes is the need for catalysts that are both cooperative and efficient.

TL;DR: The Boltzmann-Gibbs (BG) statistical mechanics has been successfully used for many nonlinear dynamical systems which, in one way or another, exhibit strong chaos as mentioned in this paper.