Stefano Zapperi - Böcker

The response of materials and the functioning of devices is often associated with noise. In this book, Stefano Zapperi concentrates on a particular type of noise, known as crackling noise, which is characterized by an intermittent series of broadly distributed pulses. While representing a nuisance in many practical applications, crackling noise can also tell us something useful about the microscopic processes ruling the materials behavior. Each crackle in the noise series usually corresponds to a localized impulsive event, an avalanche, occurring inside the material. A distinct statistical feature of crackling noise, and of the underlying avalanche behavior, is the presence of scaling, observed as power-law distributed noise pulses, long-range correlation, and scale free spectra. These are the hallmarks of critical phenomena and phase transitions.This work summarizes the current understanding of crackling noise, reviewing research undertaken in the past 30 years, from the early and influential ideas on self-organized criticality in sandpile models, to more modern studies on disordered systems. Crackling Noise covers the main theoretical models used to investigate avalanche phenomena, describes the statistical tools needed to analyze crackling noise, and provides a detailed discussion of a set of relevant examples of crackling noise in materials science. These include acoustic emission in fracture, strain bursts in amorphous and crystal plasticity, granular avalanches, magnetic noise in ferromagnets and superconductors, and fluid flow in porous media. The book concludes by considering the wider application of these models in the natural sciences.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of theoretical and experimental contributions to cancer research from different fields of physics, from biomechanics and soft-condensed matter physics to the statistical mechanics of complex systems. Reviewing these contributions and providing a sophisticated overview of the topic, this is the first book devoted to the emerging interdisciplinary field of cancer physics. Systematically integrating approaches from physics and biology, it includes topics such as cancer initiation and progression, metastasis, angiogenesis, cancer stem cells, tumor immunology, cancer cell mechanics and migration. Biological hallmarks of cancer are presented in an intuitive yet comprehensive way, providing graduate-level students and researchers in physics with a thorough introduction to this important subject. The impact of the physical mechanisms of cancer are explained through analytical and computational models, making this an essential reference for cancer biologists interested in cutting-edge quantitative tools and approaches coming from physics.

Cell migration plays an important role during development and in many physiological and pathological processes, from wound healing to cancer. This edited volume presents a collection of contributions meant to illustrate the state of the art on this topic from an interdisciplinary perspective.Readers will find a detailed discussion of the properties of individual and collective cell migration, including the associated biochemical regulation and important biophysical and biomechanical aspects. The book includes information on the latest experimental techniques employed to study cell migration, from microfluidics to traction force microscopy, as well as the latest theoretical and computational models used to interpret the experimental data. Finally, the role of cell migration in cancer and in development is also reviewed.The contents of this work should appeal to students and researchers in biology and biophysics who want to get up to date on the latest interdisciplinarydevelopment in this broad field of research. The chapters are written in a self-contained form and can also be used as individual articles.

Cell migration plays an important role during development and in many physiological and pathological processes, from wound healing to cancer.

This book explores the role of exaptation in diverse areas of life, with examples ranging from biology to economics, social sciences and architecture.