Category: Uncategorized

LAST RESORT. "Host suicide can potentially evolve either as an immediate response to infection or as a means of last resort after immunity mechanisms fail to stop pathogen reproduction. Intuitively, the second strategy would appear advantageous, and indeed in our model, when the two strategies evolve independently and then are allowed to compete, “suicide after immunity failure wins”." https://lnkd.in/d9zsv9R View in LinkedIn

COMPETING STRATEGIES. "Similarly, hosts with large suicide efficacy overtake those with adaptive immunity provided that the suicide propensity is greater than a threshold that grows with the efficacy of adaptive immunity. Notwithstanding this general trend, innate and adaptive immunity systems appear to coexist in other regions of the phase space." https://lnkd.in/d9zsv9R View in LinkedIn

TRAIT FIXATION. "High suicide efficacies prevent fixation of adaptive immunity not only in those regions where the cost-benefit balance for adaptive immunity is slightly unfavorable (even if fixation would occur in the absence of suicide by virtue of population structure), but also in some regions where this balance is favorable to adaptive immunity." https://lnkd.in/d9zsv9R View in LinkedIn

COEXISTING GROUPS. "On the other hand, if the immune efficacy is too high, hosts with and without adaptive immunity tend to coexist as the former generate environments with low pathogen pressure. This result resembles those obtained by previous theoretical studies on well-mixed populations, which predict lack of fixation for highly effective immunity systems and possible polymorphisms on the degree of immunity evolved by hosts." https://lnkd.in/d9zsv9R View in LinkedIn

STRUCTURED POPULATIONS. "Due to limited pathogen dispersion, hosts can benefit from the local decrease in pathogen abundance produced by their neighbors’ adaptive immunity. In a structured population, neighboring hosts are phenotypically correlated, reinforcing the advantage of adaptive immunity and contributing to its fixation. This effect could allow fixation of adaptive immunity even under conditions where the cost-benefit balance is not in its favor." https://lnkd.in/d9zsv9R View in LinkedIn

FREE SPIRITS. "The work...of Sims (1994) and many others, has demonstrated the power of random variations selection to rapidly create autonomous entities with the potential to evolve out from under the control of their creators." https://lnkd.in/da2m8CW View in LinkedIn

OPEN SOURCE. "Eureqa is a Machine Intelligence™ application that automates much of the heavy lifting inherent in analytics and data science. Leveraging automated evolutionary algorithms, Eureqa churns through your data to create accurate predictive models in minutes rather than months." (Hod Lipson). https://lnkd.in/dxaxRNu View in LinkedIn

SYNTHETIC LIFE. "Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first living cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA. The researchers constructed a bacterium's "genetic software" and transplanted it into a host cell." https://lnkd.in/dHrNzFp View in LinkedIn

CREATIVE MACHINES LAB. "We explore novel autonomous systems that can design and make other machines – automatically. Our work is inspired from biology, as we seek new biological concepts for engineering and new engineering insights into biology." https://lnkd.in/dWxNW_q View in LinkedIn

VIRTUAL CREATURES. "At the bottom of the hierarchy are electronic polarities, where the material and operational join to create bits, the semiotic markers of one and zero. Logic gates structure signals into bits; compiler languages are built out of bit patterns; programming languages are created from compiler languages." https://lnkd.in/dWchfhd View in LinkedIn