My postdoc is coming to an end, so I'm looking for work! Let me know if you, or anyone you know, wants to hire a philosopher of biology/cognition with a knack for cross-disciplinary work, a focus on autonomy + agency, and experience writing for the broader public (10+ yrs in sci/tech journalism).

What is the fundamental cost of stochastic oscillators? In a recent PRE, I provide an elementary derivation of a fundamental "dissipation-coherence bound". Builds on work on thermodynamics of limit-cycle oscillators by Santolin-Falasco and Nagayama-Ito journals.aps.org/pre/abstrac...

Open postdoc position. Interested in complex systems, dynamical systems, and computational mechanics? With Alexandra Jurgens at INRIA (Bordeaux) recrutement.inria.fr/public/clas...

I just learned Peter Schuster passed away recently. Peter Schuster was a theoretician who did incredible work on the origin of life, evolutionary dynamics, genotype-phenotype maps, and other topics in theoretical biology. A huge loss.

I wrote a piece for the Yale Review on AI and "jagged intelligence". (Note: headline was not written by me.) yalereview.org/article/mela...

Melanie Mitchell: What We Get Wrong About AI

Melanie Mitchell probes the jagged landscape of AI and its uncertain future.

yalereview.org

I'm so very sad to hear of the passing of Inman Harvey. He was my PhD examiner in 1999 (I'm glad to say he passed it!), and was a mentor, inspiration and friend not just to me but to a whole generation (and more) of Artificial Life researchers. He will be very sorely missed, but his legacy lives on.

Very interesting preprint 👇

arXiv cond-mat.stat-mech Statistical Mechanics@condmatstatmech-bt.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Doohyeong Cho, Hawoong Jeong: Exact Identity Linking Entropy Production and Mutual Information https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24877 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24877 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.24877

How does phase separation, a key mechanism of equilibrium self-organization, interact with nonlinear nonequilibrium dynamics? In our paper with Jonathan Bauermann and Giacomo Bartolucci @gbart.bsky.social, we look at phase separation in chemical oscillators journals.aps.org/prl/abstrac...

Open postdoc with the amazing Sarah Marzen (Scripps College, Claremont, California). Intersection of information theory, biophysics, neuroscience, and machine learning. Please RT theclaremontcolleges.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/SCR_C...

Post-Doctoral Researcher

Claremont, CA Job Posting Title: Post-Doctoral Researcher Job Description: PRIMARY PURPOSE/GENERAL DESCRIPTION: Working with Professor Sarah Marzen, the Post-Doctoral Researcher will serve in an advanced professional research capacity to conduct original scholarly and scientific research relating to the engineering of hybrid adaptive networks. The Researcher will routinely need to apply advanced knowledge in physics, applied mathematics, biophysics, scientific computing, and related fields. DESCRIPTION OF DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS: This information is intended to be descriptive of the key responsibilities of the position. The incumbent will primarily be engaged in advanced intellectual and creative professional work requiring specialized academic training and the exercise of discretion and independent judgment. Additional duties may be assigned; any such additional duties will primarily be consistent with the professional nature of the position. Independently des

theclaremontcolleges.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com

We wrote a perspective piece on future directions & challenges for stochastic thermodynamics. Great collaboration with Jan Korbel, Sarah Loos, Gonzalo Manzano, Rosalba Garcia-Millan, Olga Movilla Miangolarra, Edgar Roldan arxiv.org/abs/2604.26601

Quo vadis, stochastic thermodynamics?

Stochastic thermodynamics is a framework for describing non-equilibrium processes at the level of fluctuating trajectories, where the state of a system evolves as a stochastic time series,...

arxiv.org

Reminder: online Workshop on Stochastic Thermodynamics May 18-22 Registration deadline May 17 Detailed schedule now available: wostmeeting.org/programme/

Programme

Workshop programme is available here: wost7detailedDownload The workshop runs from approximately 3pm to 6:30pm on each day (CEST, or UTC+2).

wostmeeting.org

@davidasivak.bsky.social · 7mo ago

The seventh annual Workshop on Stochastic Thermodynamics (WOST VII) will be held May 18-22, 2026. This workshop is entirely online and free to attend. 10-minute lightning talks will be chosen from 1-page abstracts, with priority given to early-career researchers.

Postdoc opening with us at EPFL! Experimental project on how ATP driven chaperone cycles keep proteins out of equilibrium. We will quantify energy use, kinetics, and functional outcomes, including clients whose native-like functional state is stable only by sustained chaperone action.

Our paper with Andreas Dechant, Kohei Yoshimura and @ito_sosuke is out in Phys Review Research (journals.aps.org/prresearch/...). We propose a "generalized free energy" for nonequilibrium systems, plus an information-geometric decomposition of dissipation into excess & housekeeping terms

I was at the IZS in Zurich last week, a spectacular conference in a beautiful location. I used my invited paper as an opportunity to explain what biological information theory is, and why I think it is important [PDF link]: www.research-collection.ethz.ch/server/api/c...

Great post on rationalism versus empiricism in the history of optimal control.

Maxim Raginsky@mraginsky.bsky.social · 5mo ago

😎

In 1874, Georg Cantor published one of the most important papers in math’s 4,000-year history. The ideas in it were stolen. 🧵

Fascinating paper — molecular error correction might not incur an accuracy/speed tradeoff. In fact, it may be favored by evolution simply due to increased speed www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Evolution of error correction through a need for speed

Kinetic proofreading is a class of error-correcting mechanisms in biology that expend energy to avoid mistakes during replication, transcription, and translation. Proofreading is typically assumed to ...

science.org

Which of these shapes looks like the sound "bouba", and which looks like the sound "kiki"? People of all cultures agree on this, and now it's been found that baby chicks do too: phys.org/news/2026-02... It's called the bouba/kiki effect, and I think it follows from physics! (1/2)

Our paper w/ @maguilera.net & Sosuke Ito is out in PRL. We combine ideas from stochastic thermodynamics & nonequilibrium Maximum Entropy to quantify forces + dissipation in high-dimensional nonequilibrium systems, including spin glasses and neural data link: journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

Joe Halpern passed away Friday at the age of 72. He was a leader in mathematically reasoning about knowledge. www.linkedin.com/pos...

☀️ 2026 Summer School in the Pyrenees - Unifying Mathematical Models of Biodiversity Applications are now open! This school offers a state-of-the-art overview for interdisciplinary theoreticians. 🗓️ July 5-11 🎯 PhD students to senior researchers ℹ️ intp.science/en/summer26.... 📭 contact@intp.science 🌐🧪

Can we engineer cognition in aneural systems? What are the challenges and implications? Can synthetic biology be used to interrogate basal cognition? Our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social explores these questions using models of minimal gene circuits. Available here pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

"In other words, European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained" The situation is rapidly becoming unsustainable: the current research funding scheme does not work. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Point of no returns: researchers are crossing a threshold in the fight for funding

With so little money to go round, the costs of competing for grants can exceed what the grants are worth. When that happens, nobody wins.

nature.com

A remarkable preprint that shows emergence of active protocells from simple starting conditions

arXiv cond-mat.soft Soft Condensed Matter@condmatsoft-bot.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Nayan Chakraborty, Shashi Thutupalli: De novo emergence of metabolically active protocells https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11013 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11013 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.11013

If you work on the origins of life / prebiotic chemistry, consider joining OoLEN 🧬🌍 We’re an early-career community for connecting across disciplines, sharing opportunities, and building momentum together. Join: oolen.org/join (And feel free to reply with what you work on!) #OriginOfLife

Interested in the intersection of nonequilibrium thermodynamics and biophysics? Think Canada might be a nice place for your PhD/postdoc? Talk to me! Brand-new funding opportunity has quick deadline (so likely undersubscribed). nserc-crsng.canada.ca/en/news/laun... SFU internal deadline Feb 11

Launch of new Canada Impact+ Research Training Awards

As announced in Budget 2025 -

nserc-crsng.canada.ca

"Choosing problems is the primary determinant of what one accomplishes in science." 'Now What?' by Nobel Laureate John Hopfield should be required reading for aspiring scientists. pni.princeton.edu/document/1136

New paper in PRL on the relationship between thermodynamic driving and eigenvalues in Markovian master equations. We prove a weaker version of a beautiful conjecture proposed by Uhl and Seifert. Led by Guo-Hua Xu, with Jean-Charles Delvenne and Sosuke Ito journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

Thermodynamic Geometric Constraint on the Spectrum of Markov Rate Matrices

A thermodynamic constraint is placed on the spectrum of Markov rate matrices, allowing for a better understanding of the dynamics of biochemical clocks.

journals.aps.org

Cooperation is a universal feature of complex systems, from the origins of life and microbiomes to societies. What universal patterns can be found in these systems? Here's our new @pnas.org paper. @jordipinero.bsky.social @artemyte.bsky.social @sfiscience.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

The characterization of life as a thermodynamic phenomenon out of equilibrium is usually attributed to Schrödinger. What if I told you that he wasn't the first (not even the second😶‍🌫️) to reach that famous and influential conclusion?/1 #complexitycat🐈‍⬛ amahury.github.io/posts/reinve...