Locomotion is one of the major energetic costs faced by animals and various strategies have evolved to reduce its cost. Birds use interspersed periods of flapping and gliding to reduce the mechanical requirements of level flight while undergoing cyclical changes in flight altitude, known as undulating flight. Here we equipped free-ranging marine vertebrates with accelerometers and demonstrate t...

Different carbon sources, glycerol, sorbitol, acetate and lactate were added together with methanol in the induction phase of Pichia pastoris culture for angiostatin production in a 5-L fermentor. Mass balances were carried out for different processes, yield coefficients were discussed and stoichiometric coefficients were estimated to compare the efficiency of different carbon sources. Glycerol...

In nature, humans and animals move in ways that allow them to achieve energetically economical motion over a large range of velocities. In particular, researchers have shown that legged animals use multiple gaits in order to minimize their cost of transport (COT; the amount of energy used per distance traveled [1], [2]). For example, humans transition from walking to running [3], and horses tra...

Adaptive changes in energy expenditure to changes in energy intake are far less than previously believed once changes in body weight and physical activity are taken into account. Alterations in metabolic efficiency of +/- 10% in total energy expenditure are the limits of what can normally be expected on prolonged under- or overfeeding. The supposed twofold variation in energy requirements of ad...

We apply information theoretic and energetic constraints to a key problem in cell signaling. While the cell signaling modeling process generally starts with assumptions about the system’s structure, additional assumptions about the system’s performance objectives can be used to compensate for insufficient data. In our work, we obtain parameters for a model of signal transduction across a T-cell...

Because maintenance of non-scalable cellular components--membranes and chromosomes--requires an increasing fraction of energy as cell size decreases, miniaturization comes at a considerable energetic cost for a phytoplanktonic cell. Consequently, if eukaryotes can use their superior energetic resources to acquire nutrients with more or even similar efficiency compared with prokaryotes, larger u...

Free living organisms typically occur in harsh environments challenged by abiotic stresses of varying intensities. Taking ionizing radiation and caloric restriction as examples, environmental variation from benign to extreme gives a fitness-stress continuum where energetic efficiency, a measure of fitness, is inversely related to stress level. Hormesis occurs in benign regions for these example...

The Earth’s ring current and how it responds to varying interplanetary conditions is described and an account provided of the production of Energetic Neutral Atoms (ENAs) in the geo-corona. Also, the potential to remotely monitor, on a global scale, the temporal and spatial evolution of magnetospheric plasma populations through analysing ENA images recorded during magnetic storms/substorms is i...

[1] The first all‐sky maps of Energetic Neutral Atoms (ENAs) from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) exhibited smoothly varying, globally distributed flux and a narrow “ribbon” of enhanced ENA emissions. In this study we compare the second set of sky maps to the first in order to assess the possibility of temporal changes over the 6 months between views of each portion of the sky. While ...

With safety aspects due to closer human-robot interaction and increased requirements in energy effiency due to mobile applications, series elastic joint concepts receive high priority in contemporary robotics. Beyond making robots more safe and flexbile, such concepts can store energy and thus optimize the energetic efficiency of the robot’s motion. Therefore adjusting the stiffness is advantag...