One of the most fundamental, but least understood features of living things is the high
degree of coordination among the system's many parts. Our aim is to identify the principles …

How order can emerge spontaneously from a disordered system has always fascinated
scientists from numerous disciplines. Especially in active systems like flocks animals, self …

Cellular populations assume an incredible variety of shapes ranging from circular molds to
irregular tumors. While we understand many of the mechanisms responsible for these …

Biological systems excel at building spatial structures on scales ranging from nanometres to
kilometres and exhibit temporal patterning from milliseconds to years. One approach that …

Living systems maintain or increase local order by working against the second law of
thermodynamics. Thermodynamic consistency is restored as they consume free energy …

Ensembles of collectively moving particles like flocks of birds, bacteria, or filamentous
polymers show a broad range of intriguing phenomena, yet seem to obey very similar …

Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the spontaneous generation of self-
organised patterns, hypothesised to play a role in the formation of many of the magnificent …

We investigate the dynamics of a thermally convecting fluid as it interacts with freely moving
solid objects. This is a previously unexplored paradigm of interactions between many free …

The synchronized flashing of fireflies at night. The spiraling patterns of an aggregating slime
mold. The anastomosing network of army-ant trails. The coordinated movements of a school …

We investigate whether the equilibrium time-averaged state of a self-organizing system with
many internal degrees of freedom, 2D-daisyworld, can be described by optimizing a single …