Showing papers in "Physics of Life Reviews in 2015"

TL;DR: It is discussed how these models can capture the dynamics that characterize many real-world scenarios, thereby suggesting ways that policy makers can better design effective prevention strategies and pitfalls which might be faced by researchers in the field.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors proposed new universal scaling parameters for the dilemma strength, and proved universality by showing that the conditions for an ESS and the expressions for the internal equilibriums in an infinite, well-mixed population subjected to any of the five reciprocity mechanisms depend only on the new scaling parameters.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors review different approaches aimed at modeling and improving our understanding of crime, focusing on the nucleation of crime hotspots using partial differential equations, self-exciting point process and agent-based modeling, adversarial evolutionary games, and network science behind the formation of gangs and large-scale organized crime.

TL;DR: A growing body of research on generative mechanisms suggests that Lévy walks can arise freely as by-products of otherwise innocuous behaviours; consequently their advantageous properties are purely coincidental and should be amended or replaced by a simpler and more general hypothesis.

TL;DR: A considerable body of research and scholarship is discussed that provides evidence for music's capacity to promote empathy and social/cultural understanding through powerful affective, cognitive and social factors, and ways in which to connect and make sense of this disparate evidence (and counter-evidence).

TL;DR: A neurobiological theory of emotions that includes emotions which are uniquely human (such as complex moral emotions), considers the role of language for emotions, advances the understanding of neural correlates of attachment-related emotions, and integrates emotion theories from different disciplines is presented.

TL;DR: This work proposes that the building blocks of the mirror mechanism are the relatively few motor synergies explaining the variety of hand functions, and can be potentially very robust to visual noise and thus demonstrate a clear advantage of using motor knowledge for classifying others' action.

TL;DR: It is argued that probabilistic causality is a conceptually appropriate foundation for describing neural causality in the brain, which originated from inherent conceptual problems with deterministic regularity theories and resonates with concepts of stochasticity that were involved in establishing modern physics.

TL;DR: A critical analysis of the existing literature on mathematical tools developed toward systems biology approaches develops a new approach whose main features can be briefly summarized as derivation of mathematical structures suitable to capture the complexity of biological, hence living, systems.

TL;DR: A conceptual framework for genetic mapping of complex traits by which to delineate the underlying components, interactions and mechanisms that govern the system according to biological principles and understand how these components function synergistically under the control of quantitative trait loci (QTLs) to comprise a unified whole is built.

TL;DR: In this review, fluorescence-based and force-based single-molecule experiments and inherently nonequilibrium nature of biological processes will be highlighted and simulated trajectories of biomolecular diffusion will be used to compare and validate various analysis techniques.

TL;DR: This paper presents a meta-modelling procedure that was developed at the National Institute of Science and Technology of Complex Systems (NISTS) in Rio de Janeiro and showed real-time information about the response of the immune system to various types of invaders.

TL;DR: The theoretical underpinnings of the ‘Lévy paradigm’ should now be modified in light of recent research showing that various seemingly ‘innocuous’ and ‘banal’ interactions between an animal and its environment can also lead to the emergence of Lévy patterns.

TL;DR: Modelling the diffusion of criminal (or simply unlawful) behaviour in urban areas can be a tool that administrations and police authorities can use in order to choose optimal strategies to combat crime.

TL;DR: This paper presents a meta-modelling procedure called “CAMTP – Center for Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics”, which automates the very labor-intensive and therefore time-heavy and expensive and expensive process of numerical analysis of discrete-time polynomial inequality.

TL;DR: The authors propose that the quartet of perception, action, learning and emotion occurs in a recursive Bayesian process by which the brain tries to minimize the error between the input and the brain’s expectation.

TL;DR: The hippocampus plays a role for social emotions that do not, or satiate only in very long-term, such as the bond of affection for a child or love, and the hippocampus is also involved in processing aesthetic emotions induced by music.

TL;DR: The broad optimality and apparent deep evolutionary origin of movement (search) patterns that are well approximated by Levy walks led to the development of the LevyFlight foraging (LFF) hypothesis, which states that “since Levy flights and walks can optimize search efficiencies, therefore natural selection should have led to adaptations for Levy flight foraging”.

TL;DR: The most surprising result arising from the “marriage” between epidemiology and physics was that any spreading rate of a disease in a scale-free network, no matter how low it is, causes the infection to spread over the whole network.

TL;DR: The very first living cells on Earth, possibly developing in aqueous environments, displaced to invade and colonize new environments but they may have had to remain close to con-specifics in order to ensure that mechanisms such as horizontal gene transfer worked effectively.

TL;DR: This work believes that the novel hippocampal conjunction of for the most part familiar (long-term) knowledge patterns elicits the positive affect of appreciation, and chose Oscar Wilde’s quote as title because it is thought that this function has a considerable impact on the episodic operations in the hippocampus.

TL;DR: The authors suggest that due to its temporally-extended nature, portability (via compact listening technologies), and crossmodal impact on listeners, music appears to be an especially potent cognitive tool.