scholarly journals Stable States of Biological Organisms

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. I. Yukalov ◽  
D. Sornette ◽  
E. P. Yukalova ◽  
J.-Y. Henry ◽  
J. P. Cobb
1999 ◽  
Vol 38 (03) ◽  
pp. 154-157
Author(s):  
W. Fierz ◽  
R. Grütter

AbstractWhen dealing with biological organisms, one has to take into account some peculiarities which significantly affect the representation of knowledge about them. These are complemented by the limitations in the representation of propositional knowledge, i. e. the majority of clinical knowledge, by artificial agents. Thus, the opportunities to automate the management of clinical knowledge are widely restricted to closed contexts and to procedural knowledge. Therefore, in dynamic and complex real-world settings such as health care provision to HIV-infected patients human and artificial agents must collaborate in order to optimize the time/quality antinomy of services provided. If applied to the implementation level, the overall requirement ensues that the language used to model clinical contexts should be both human- and machine-interpretable. The eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which is used to develop an electronic study form, is evaluated against this requirement, and its contribution to collaboration of human and artificial agents in the management of clinical knowledge is analyzed.


2009 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Beckage ◽  
Chris Ellingwood ◽  

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cory Simon ◽  
carlo carraro

<div>In the two-balloon experiment, two rubber balloons are connected and allowed to exchange gas. Owing to the non-monotonic relationship between the radius of the balloon and the pressure of gas inside of it, the two-balloon system presents multi- and in-stabilities.</div><div><br></div><div>Herein, we consider a two-adsorbent system, where two different adsorbents are allowed to exchange gas. We show that, for rigid adsorbents, the thermodynamic equilibrium state is unique.</div><div><br></div><div>Then, we consider an adsorbent-balloon system, where an adsorbent exchanges gas with a rubber balloon. This system can exhibit multiple states at thermodynamic equilibrium-- two (meta)stable and one unstable. The size of the balloon, pressure of gas in the balloon, and partitioning of gas between the adsorbent and the balloon differ among the equilibrium states. Temperature changes and the addition/removal of gas into/from the adsorbent-balloon system can induce catastrophe bifurcations and show hysteresis. Furthermore, the adsorbent-balloon system exhibits a critical temperature where, when approached from below, the discrepancy of balloon size between the two (meta)stable states decreases and, beyond, bistability is impossible.</div><div><br></div><div>Practically, our findings preclude multiple partitions of adsorbed gas in rigid mixed-linker metal-organic frameworks and may inspire new soft actuator and sensor designs.</div>


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Zhu Bai ◽  
Mingxia Huang ◽  
Shuai Bian ◽  
Huandong Wu

The emergence of online car-hailing service provides an innovative approach to vehicle booking but has negatively influenced the taxi industry in China. This paper modeled taxi service mode choice based on evolutionary game theory (EGT). The modes included the dispatching and online car-hailing modes. We constructed an EGT framework, including determining the strategies and the payoff matrix. We introduced different behaviors, including taxi company management, driver operation, and passenger choice. This allowed us to model the impact of these behaviors on the evolving process of service mode choice. The results show that adjustments in taxi company, driver, and passenger behaviors impact the evolutionary path and convergence speed of our evolutionary game model. However, it also reveals that, regardless of adjustments, the stable states in the game model remain unchanged. The conclusion provides a basis for studying taxi system operation and management.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (9) ◽  
pp. eabf1966
Author(s):  
Hang Zhang ◽  
Jun Wu ◽  
Daining Fang ◽  
Yihui Zhang

Multistable mechanical metamaterials are artificial materials whose microarchitectures offer more than two different stable configurations. Existing multistable mechanical metamaterials mainly rely on origami/kirigami-inspired designs, snap-through instability, and microstructured soft mechanisms, with mostly bistable fundamental unit cells. Scalable, tristable structural elements that can be built up to form mechanical metamaterials with an extremely large number of programmable stable configurations remains illusive. Here, we harness the elastic tensile/compressive asymmetry of kirigami microstructures to design a class of scalable X-shaped tristable structures. Using these structure as building block elements, hierarchical mechanical metamaterials with one-dimensional (1D) cylindrical geometries, 2D square lattices, and 3D cubic/octahedral lattices are designed and demonstrated, with capabilities of torsional multistability or independent controlled multidirectional multistability. The number of stable states increases exponentially with the cell number of mechanical metamaterials. The versatile multistability and structural diversity allow demonstrative applications in mechanical ternary logic operators and amplitude modulators with unusual functionalities.


Author(s):  
Amita Bedar ◽  
Beena G. Singh ◽  
Pradip K. Tewari ◽  
Ramesh C. Bindal ◽  
Soumitra Kar

Abstract Cerium oxide (ceria) contains two stable states of cerium ions (Ce3+ and Ce4+). The presence of these two states and the ability to swap from one state to another (Ce3+ ↔ Ce4+) by scavenging the highly reactive oxygen species (ROS) generated from radiolysis of water, ensure the enhanced stability of polysulfone (Psf) membranes in the γ-radiation environment. In this study, the ROS scavenging ability of ceria was studied. Ceria nanoparticles were found to scavenge ROS like hydroxyl radicals and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). The H2O2 scavenging is due to the peroxidase-like catalytic activity of ceria nanoparticles. The ROS scavenging is responsible for offering protection to the Psf host matrix and in turn the stability to the Psf-ceria mixed-matrix membranes (MMMs) in γ-radiation environment. Thus, presence of ceria nanoparticles provides an opportunity for utilizing Psf-ceria MMMs in ionizing radiation environment with increased life span, without compromise in the performance.


2021 ◽  
pp. 205301962110015
Author(s):  
Maurizio Meloni ◽  
Rachael Wakefield-Rann ◽  
Becky Mansfield

The Anthropocene literature has brought attention to the plasticity and porosity of Earth systems under the dramatic impact of human activities. Moving across scales of analysis, this paper focuses attention on anthropogenic effects at the micro-scale of genomic regulation, neuronal functioning and cellular activity. Building on expanding dialogues at the interface of Anthropocene science, biogeography, microbiology and ecotoxicology, we mobilize epigenetic findings to show increasing evidence of anthropogenic changes in plants, animals and human bodies. Treating human-induced changes at the macro-global and micro-biological scales as part of an intertwined process has implications for how these problems are conceptualised and addressed. While we are sceptics about major geo-bio-social syntheses, we believe that agile social-scientific tools can facilitate interaction across disciplines without denying unevenness, and differences. If rightly contextualized in broad anthropological and social science frameworks, biosocial work on epigenetics offers a compelling avenue to make detectable the ‘slow violence’ of everyday pollution, racism, inequalities and the disproportionate impact of the Anthropocene on the poor and vulnerable. Consolidating work at the Anthropocene/biology interface has potential to offer a richer and more complete picture of the present crisis at the macro and micro-scale alike.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian W. Bauer ◽  
Nicholas L. Rodd ◽  
Bryan R. Webber

Abstract We compute the decay spectrum for dark matter (DM) with masses above the scale of electroweak symmetry breaking, all the way to the Planck scale. For an arbitrary hard process involving a decay to the unbroken standard model, we determine the prompt distribution of stable states including photons, neutrinos, positrons, and antiprotons. These spectra are a crucial ingredient in the search for DM via indirect detection at the highest energies as being probed in current and upcoming experiments including IceCube, HAWC, CTA, and LHAASO. Our approach improves considerably on existing methods, for instance, we include all relevant electroweak interactions.


Human Affairs ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 587-596
Author(s):  
Elena Popa

AbstractThis paper investigates the concept of behavioral autonomy in Artificial Life by drawing a parallel to the use of teleological notions in the study of biological life. Contrary to one of the leading assumptions in Artificial Life research, I argue that there is a significant difference in how autonomous behavior is understood in artificial and biological life forms: the former is underlain by human goals in a way that the latter is not. While behavioral traits can be explained in relation to evolutionary history in biological organisms, in synthetic life forms behavior depends on a design driven by a research agenda, further shaped by broader human goals. This point will be illustrated with a case study on a synthetic life form. Consequently, the putative epistemic benefit of reaching a better understanding of behavioral autonomy in biological organisms by synthesizing artificial life forms is subject to doubt: the autonomy observed in such artificial organisms may be a mere projection of human agency. Further questions arise in relation to the need to spell out the relevant human aims when addressing potential social or ethical implications of synthesizing artificial life forms.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document