For Emperor penguins waddling around a warming Antarctic, diminishing sea ice means less fish to eat. How the diets of these tuxedoed birds will hold up in the face of climate change is a big question scientists are grappling with. Researchers at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, the Centre Scie...
During breeding, king penguins do not build nests, however they show strong territorial behaviour and keep a pecking distance to neighbouring penguins. Penguin positions in breeding colonies are highly stable over weeks and appear regularly spaced, but thus far no quantitative analysis of the struct...
Many cell types in our body, such as fibroblasts, immune cells but also cancer cells, are able to actively migrate and squeeze through the tiny pores and cell layers in our tissue. Similarly, blood cells are passively pushed and squeezed through narrow capillaries. In both cases, the deformability o...
Human cells can be easily deformed — they stretch or become squashed under external pressure. The relationship between force and cell deformation changes in diseases such as cancer, lung disease and heart disease, as well as muscle disorders. To gain a better understanding of these diseases it...
Metastases occur when tumour cells detach from the primary tumour and migrate to distant sites through the connective tissue of organs. During this migration process, the tumour cells generate mechanical forces in order to overcome the resistance of the connective tissue or to change their shape so ...
Search and rescue teams routinely use Bayesian updating to track down crashed airplanes or sunken ships: they draw a map with a first guess of the most probable locations and then continuously update the probability map as new information comes in. Physicists from the University of Erlangen-Nurember...
Emperor penguins are able to maintain the tight huddle that protects them from the harsh conditions of an Antarctic winter with stop-and-go movements like cars in a traffic jam. By using a mathematical model that computes the positions, movements and interactions of individual penguins in a huddle, ...
