The purpose of this overview is to provide a background for understanding the relation between the biological maturation of the frontal lobes and the development of the psychological concept of executive functions. In the first section, an interactive hierarchical feedback model is presented as a heuristic way of conceptualizing the relationship of the frontal lobes and executive functions to o...

Here we shall discuss the need of Complex Systems Engineering to adopt principles from natural development of complex biological organisms—besides principles of natural evolution—to acomplish the type of performance that biology achieves regularly. We shall situate Complex Systems Engineering and discuss an example of how it could be employed. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 13:12–21,...

The quest to 'forward-engineer' and fabricate biological machines remains a grand challenge. Towards this end, we have fabricated locomotive "bio-bots" from hydrogels and cardiomyocytes using a 3D printer. The multi-material bio-bot consisted of a 'biological bimorph' cantilever structure as the actuator to power the bio-bot, and a base structure to define the asymmetric shape for locomotion. T...

A nonlinear model for biological and physical dynamical interactions in a laminar flow field being upwelled into the mixed layer Robinson(1999) (Fig 1, below) has been extended to turbulent flow (Goodman and Robinson, 2007). The approach of the Goodman and Robinson theory has been to develop a probability density function (pdf) for the turbulent displacement field and use that to calculate the ...

We report the development of an ultrasound bioprobe for in vitro molecular imaging. In this method, the phase of the scattered ultrasound wave is mapped to provide in vitro and intracellular imaging with nanometer-scale resolution under physiological conditions. We demonstrated the technique by successfully imaging a magnetic core in silica core shells and the stiffness image of intracellular f...

UNLABELLED We recently implemented improvements to the representation of immunology content of the biological process branch of the Gene Ontology (GO). The aims of the revision were to provide a comprehensive representation of immunological processes and to improve the organization of immunology related terms in the GO to match current concepts in the field of immunology. With these improvement...

Adaptation is a central organizing principle throughout biology, whether we are studying species, populations, or individuals. Adaptation in biological systems occurs in response to molar and molecular environments. Thus, we would predict that genetic systems and nervous systems would be dynamic (cybernetic) in contrast to previous conceptualizations with genes and brains fixed in form and func...

In this paper, biological and mathematical approaches to vascular development are presented with the comparison of several modeling and simulation methods with respect to the growth of vascular trees and wound healing. The links between mathematical modeling and biological mechanism of angiogenesis are discussed. Suggestions for further modeling are given.