Why live larger mammals longer than smaller ones? Why is the energy consumption per body mass of a mouse six times higher than that of a human? These questions and many others dealing with biological allometry kept and keep biologists busy since the second half of nineteenth century and as it seems, the ultimate answers have not yet been given. Analyzing allometry is particularly attractive sin...

The basic rules of central place networks are abstracted and formulated as three geometric series scaling laws, which can be transformed into several power laws associated with fractal structure. The scaling laws might be the Rosetta Stone to understand the complexity of human geographical systems because they take the form of Horton and Strahler's laws in geomorphology and Gutenberg and Richte...

For high-level functional categories that are represented in almost all prokaryotic genomes, the numbers of genes in these categories scale as power-laws in the total number of genes. We present a comprehensive analysis of the variation in these scaling laws across prokaryotic clades and lifestyles. For the large majority of functional categories, including transcription regulators, the inferre...

Although already defined in 1926 by A. Lotka, power laws are becoming more and more important since they have been found valid in social networks such as the Internet. In this paper we prove some unique properties of power laws. We show that they characterise functions with the scale-free property (also called self-similarity property) as well as functions with the product property. They also h...

Combined heat and power systems are becoming more and more important, regarding their enhanced efficiency, energy saving, and environmental aspects. In the peresent study, three configurations of combined heat and power systems are intended as an alternative to separate production plant by considering environmental aspects. First and second laws of thermodynamics are adapted to the operatin...