Physics of plant computation and behavior @ Tel Aviv University.
Art-science - and all that jazz..🌱🔬🧪💻📸🌼
https://www.merozlab.com/
Meroz Lab
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Plants are everywhere 🌳 but rarely thought of as computing.
New review (preprint 🪩 lnkd.in/d5KwzzPN): plants sense, compute, and move without a brain - via growth, combining physical computation, embodied intelligence & functional noise.
A physics view of decentralized behavior in living matter 🌱
Preprint 🌱 Plants build nonlinear vectorial representations of light patterns!
Surprising results: Opposing cues cancel, so plants grow towards a weaker tie-breaker light.
Plants respond to sum of transduced signals, not physical sum of light: optical “illusions”! 🪩
tinyurl.com/44f83xh8
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🔬 This week in my course “Physics of Living Systems - in the Lab and Kitchen”, we explored viscosity & its microscopic origins. 👨🍳 Chef Yaniv Gur Arieh demonstrated different methods for sauce thickening: emulsions, gelatinization, reduction & modernist polymers. So much (tasty) soft matter physics!
Meroz Lab
Meroz Lab
🥐 Master Baker Yuval Elhadeff shows how dough elasticity is manipulated by changing network properties of gluten!
🪩 1st demo in my course ”Physics of living systems, lab+kitchen”. When we cook we manipulate bio tissue with processes rooted in physics.
More to come!
Awesome view from Artemis II this morning.
🌱 “To twine or not to twine?”
Preprint 🪩 Plants use inherent circular movements (circumnuations) for active sensing of support mechanical stability (eg whisking 🐭), twining occurs at a torque threshold. Heroic experiments by Amir Ohad, fancy simulations @amirporat.bsky.social:
tinyurl.com/2syh4ny3
28 months later: In December 2024, I participated in the Ernst Strüngmann Forum on #Navigation #Research 🧭🧪 Now the book has been published including our chapter of group 2 ("team zoo" 🦠🐜🐦🦞🐒🦍🐢🤖) on the "Universal Principles of Navigation across Species and Spatial Scales" ↘️ doi.org/10.1007/978-... ↙️
New preprint 🌱
Segment plants in time-series images using foundation model SAM2 - without training a model 🪩. Magician Alex Abbey!
💡SAP works across species, scales, and even z-stacks.
From single cells to whole plants→ quantitative growth & dynamics .
tinyurl.com/3raedtvm
@biosofttau.bsky.social
Honeybee swarms do not come together and fall apart in the same way 🐝
In this new preprint led by Danielle Chase, we report how to trick swarms to repeatedly assemble and disassemble in front of our cameras, while tracking individual bees in 3D!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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Meroz Lab
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#LivingArchitectures
Congratulations @manuelthery.bsky.social @lblanchoin.bsky.social and all Scientists of the #CytoMorphoLab for their poetic vision of the microscopic level.
