Without magic bullets: the biological basis for public health interventions against protein folding disorders

Protein folding disorders of aging like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases currently present intractable medical challenges. 'Small molecule' interventions - drug treatments - often have, at best, palliative impact, failing to alter disease course. The design of individual or population level interventions will likely require a deeper understanding of protein folding and its regulation than currently provided by contemporary 'physics' or culture-bound medical magic bullet models. Here, a topological rate distortion analysis is applied to the problem of protein folding and regulation that is similar in spirit to Tlusty's (2010a) elegant exploration of the genetic code. The formalism produces large-scale, quasi-equilibrium 'resilience' states representing normal and pathological protein folding regulation under a cellular-level cognitive paradigm similar to that proposed by Atlan and Cohen (1998) for the immune system. Generalization to long times produces diffusion models of protein folding disorders in which epigenetic or life history factors determine the rate of onset of regulatory failure, in essence, a premature aging driven by familiar synergisms between disjunctions of resource allocation and need in the context of socially or physiologically toxic exposures and chronic powerlessness at individual and group scales. Application of an HPA axis model is made to recent observed differences in Alzheimer's onset rates in White and African American subpopulations as a function of an index of distress-proneness

Evolutionary modeling in economics : recent history and immediate prospects

Abstract not availablemathematical economics and econometrics ;

Evolutionary games on graphs

Game theory is one of the key paradigms behind many scientific disciplines from biology to behavioral sciences to economics. In its evolutionary form and especially when the interacting agents are linked in a specific social network the underlying solution concepts and methods are very similar to those applied in non-equilibrium statistical physics. This review gives a tutorial-type overview of the field for physicists. The first three sections introduce the necessary background in classical and evolutionary game theory from the basic definitions to the most important results. The fourth section surveys the topological complications implied by non-mean-field-type social network structures in general. The last three sections discuss in detail the dynamic behavior of three prominent classes of models: the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Rock-Scissors-Paper game, and Competing Associations. The major theme of the review is in what sense and how the graph structure of interactions can modify and enrich the picture of long term behavioral patterns emerging in evolutionary games.Comment: Review, final version, 133 pages, 65 figure

Emerging heterogeneities in Italian customs and comparison with nearby countries

In this work we apply techniques and modus operandi typical of Statistical Mechanics to a large dataset about key social quantifiers and compare the resulting behaviours of five European nations, namely France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland. The social quantifiers considered are $i.$ the evolution of the number of autochthonous marriages (i.e. between two natives) within a given territorial district and $ii.$ the evolution of the number of mixed marriages (i.e. between a native and an immigrant) within a given territorial district. Our investigations are twofold. From a theoretical perspective, we develop novel techniques, complementary to classical methods (e.g. historical series and logistic regression), in order to detect possible collective features underlying the empirical behaviours; from an experimental perspective, we evidence a clear outline for the evolution of the social quantifiers considered. The comparison between experimental results and theoretical predictions is excellent and allows speculating that France, Italy and Spain display a certain degree of {\em internal heterogeneity}, that is not found in Germany and Switzerland; such heterogeneity, quite mild in France and in Spain, is not negligible in Italy and highlights quantitative differences in the customs of Northern and Southern regions. These findings may suggest the persistence of two culturally distinct communities, long-term lasting heritages of different and well-established cultures.Comment: in PLoS One (2015

A view of Neural Networks as dynamical systems

We consider neural networks from the point of view of dynamical systems theory. In this spirit we review recent results dealing with the following questions, adressed in the context of specific models. 1. Characterizing the collective dynamics; 2. Statistical analysis of spikes trains; 3. Interplay between dynamics and network structure; 4. Effects of synaptic plasticity.Comment: Review paper, 51 pages, 10 figures. submitte