A. An Emergent Ecode: An Ecosmome to Geonome Complementary Endowment is Found Everywhere

Xu, Yifan, et al. Sleep restores an optimal computational regime in cortical networks.. Nature Neuroscience.. 27/328, 2024. Washington University, St. Louis biologists including Ralf Wessel and Keith Hengen add another instance of the brain’s propensity to more or less reside in a preferred self-organized state. After a long, tiring day, they find that our a good night’s rest then serves to restore this optimum condition.

Sleep is assumed to subserve homeostatic processes in the brain; however, the set point around which sleep tunes circuit computations is unknown. Slow-wave activity (SWA) is used to reflect the homeostatic aspects; it does not explain why animals need sleep. This study aimed to assess whether criticality may be the set point of sleep. By recording cortical neuron activity in freely behaving rats, we show that normal waking experience can disrupt this poise and that sleep functions to restore critical dynamics. Our results demonstrate that perturbation and recovery of criticality is a network homeostatic mechanism consistent with the core, restorative function of sleep. (Excerpt)

Zamponi, Nahuel, et al. Scale Free Density and Fluctuations in the Dynamics of Large Microbial Ecosystems. arXiv:2206.12384. Four senior researchers with postings in the USA, Argentina, Poland, and Italy including Dante Chialvo discuss how these critically poised features, just as everywhere else from the ISM to the Internet it seems, serve suffuse and enhance bacterial assemblies. Once again a vital, dynamic poise between stability and flexibility, aka “nature’s sweet spot” as coined by Chialvo, seems best.

Microorganisms self-organize in extensive communities exhibiting complex fluctuations. But the ways that these systems can achieve variability along with a basic robustness is not well explained. Here we analyze three aspects of microbiota and plankton: density changes, the correlation structure and an avalanching fluidity. Our results find scale-free densities, anomalous variance' stages, abundance relations and stationary scale-free waves in effect. These behaviors, which typically occur in critically poised systems, suggest this active state is a way to explain both the robust and irregular phases and processes of copious microbial colonies.

Zhou, Zheng, et al. Fractal Quantum Phase Transitions: Critical Phenomena Beyond Renormalization. arXiv:2105.05851. We note this entry by Fudan University, Chongqing University, Technical University of Munich and Princeton University physicists as they proceed to find one more instance of nature’s dynamic preference even way down in this long arcane, foundational realm.

Quantum critical points connecting different phases have broad implications in modern many-body physics. Their universal features are determined using the renormalization group (RG) theory, since salient properties at the phase transition point can be discerned by coarse-graining the local fluctuations and focusing on the physics at the long wavelength limit. Based on this observation, a wide class of universal phenomena can be revealed by symmetry, locality, and dimensionality. Here we investigate a special type fractal symmetry. (1)

Zimatore, Giovanna, et al. Self-organization of Whole-Gene Expression through Coordinated Chromatin Structural Transition. Biophysics Reviews. September, 2021. Five geneticists posted in Italy, Japan, and Poland including Masa Tsuchiya provide still another, significant genomic example of nature’s persistence to reach and reside at an optimum reciprocal poise.

The human DNA molecule is a long polymer collapsed into the micrometer space of the cell nucleus. This simple consideration leads to gene-by-gene regulation which better contrasts with the physical reality in the presence of cell state transitions that involvef thousands of genes. This state of affairs invites a statistical mechanics approach where specificity arises from a selective unfolding of chromatin driving the rewiring of gene expression patterns. The arising of “expression waves” marking state transitions can be related to chromatin reorganization through self-organized critical control of whole-genome. (Excerpt)

Zimmern, Vincent. Why Brain Criticality is Clinically Revelant. Frontiers in Neural Circuits. August, 2020. A UT Southwestern Medical Center child neurologist provides an actual survey of the palliative implications of this by now accepted, phenomenal condition whence our brains seek and become poised at this optimum dynamic state.

The past 25 years have seen increased number of publications related to criticality in neuroscience. But recent writings on this topic make brief mention of clinical applications to such disorders as epilepsy, neurodegenerative disease, neonatal hypoxia, along with sleep issues and developmental-behavioral pediatrics. In this scoping review, studies of brain criticality involving human data of all ages are evaluated for their clinical relevance. In regard, the prime concepts behind criticality (e.g., phase transitions, long-range temporal correlation, self-organized criticality, power laws, branching processes) will precede their neurological occasion. (Excerpt)

Previous   1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6