February, 2017 | Chris Aldrich

🔖 Causal Entropic Forces, Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 168702 (2013)

Bookmarked Causal Entropic Forces (Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 168702 (2013) journals.aps.org )

Recent advances in fields ranging from cosmology to computer science have hinted at a possible deep connection between intelligence and entropy maximization, but no formal physical relationship between them has yet been established. Here, we explicitly propose a first step toward such a relationship in the form of a causal generalization of entropic forces that we find can cause two defining behaviors of the human “cognitive niche”—tool use and social cooperation—to spontaneously emerge in simple physical systems. Our results suggest a potentially general thermodynamic model of adaptive behavior as a nonequilibrium process in open systems.

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A. D. Wissner-Gross and C. E. Freer, “Causal Entropic Forces,” Physical Review Letters, vol. 110, no. 16. American Physical Society (APS), 19-Apr-2013 [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.168702 [Source]

🔖 Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relation for Biomolecular Processes, Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 158101 (2015)

Bookmarked Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relation for Biomolecular Processes (Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 158101 (2015) - journals.aps.org)

Biomolecular systems like molecular motors or pumps, transcription and translation machinery, and other enzymatic reactions, can be described as Markov processes on a suitable network. We show quite generally that, in a steady state, the dispersion of observables, like the number of consumed or produced molecules or the number of steps of a motor, is constrained by the thermodynamic cost of generating it. An uncertainty ε requires at least a cost of 2k_B T/ε^2 independent of the time required to generate the output.

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A. C. Barato and U. Seifert, “Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relation for Biomolecular Processes,” Physical Review Letters, vol. 114, no. 15. American Physical Society (APS), 15-Apr-2015 [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.158101 [Source]

🔖 Hayflick, his limit, and cellular ageing | Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology

Bookmarked Hayflick, his limit, and cellular ageing ( Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology)

Almost 40 years ago, Leonard Hayflick discovered that cultured normal human cells have limited capacity to divide, after which they become senescent — a phenomenon now known as the ‘Hayflick limit’. Hayflick's findings were strongly challenged at the time, and continue to be questioned in a few circles, but his achievements have enabled others to make considerable progress towards understanding and manipulating the molecular mechanisms of ageing.

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J. Shay and W. Wright, “Hayflick, his limit, and cellular ageing.,” Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 72–6, Oct. 2000. [PubMed]

🔖 Evidence for a limit to human lifespan | Nature Research

Bookmarked Evidence for a limit to human lifespan (nature.com)

Driven by technological progress, human life expectancy has increased greatly since the nineteenth century. Demographic evidence has revealed an ongoing reduction in old-age mortality and a rise of the maximum age at death, which may gradually extend human longevity. Together with observations that lifespan in various animal species is flexible and can be increased by genetic or pharmaceutical intervention, these results have led to suggestions that longevity may not be subject to strict, species-specific genetic constraints. Here, by analysing global demographic data, we show that improvements in survival with age tend to decline after age 100, and that the age at death of the world’s oldest person has not increased since the 1990s. Our results strongly suggest that the maximum lifespan of humans is fixed and subject to natural constraints.

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X. Dong, B. Milholland, and J. Vijg, “Evidence for a limit to human lifespan.,” Nature, vol. 538, no. 7624, pp. 257–259, Oct. 2016. [PubMed]

🔖 Energy flow and the organization of life | Complexity

Bookmarked Energy flow and the organization of life (Complexity, September 2007)

Understanding the emergence and robustness of life requires accounting for both chemical specificity and statistical generality. We argue that the reverse of a common observation—that life requires a source of free energy to persist—provides an appropriate principle to understand the emergence, organization, and persistence of life on earth. Life, and in particular core biochemistry, has many properties of a relaxation channel that was driven into existence by free energy stresses from the earth's geochemistry. Like lightning or convective storms, the carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus fluxes through core anabolic pathways make sense as the order parameters in a phase transition from an abiotic to a living state of the geosphere. Interpreting core pathways as order parameters would both explain their stability over billions of years, and perhaps predict the uniqueness of specific optimal chemical pathways.

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H. Morowitz and E. Smith, “Energy flow and the organization of life,” Complexity, vol. 13, no. 1. Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 51–59, 2007 [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cplx.20191