2 Quantitative Life Sciences Seminars - 10 and 12 February

[Quantitative Life Sciences]

QUANTITATIVE LIFE SCIENCES SEMINARS:

*Wednesday**, 10 February - 11:00**am*
***Central Area**, 2nd Floor**- ICTP, old SISSA Building*

Title: "May the faculty of language emerge from a glassy phase transition?"

Speaker: Alessandro TREVES, Cognitive Neuroscience, SISSA

Abstract:
"In LIMBO we have explored latching dynamics in simplified cortical
networks as a model of spontaneous production, for example of sentences.
Latching, or jumping from one attractor state to the next, emerges beyond
a critical value of network connectivity, without any change or extra
ingredient in organization, a clue to the possible evolutionary path of
a cortex capable of sustaining language. In departing from the simplest
model towards the complexity of real languages, however, we face the major
effect of correlations and of the resulting disorder-dominated dynamics,
which call for the refinement and application of statistical physics
tools to linguistic data. "

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*Friday**, 12 February - 11:00**am*
*****Central Area**, 2nd Floor**- ICTP, old SISSA Building*

Title: "The depletion attraction and its role in the physical behaviour 
of crowded macromolecular systems"

Speaker: Giuseppe D'ADAMO, Molecular and Statistical Biophysics, SISSA

Abstract:
"In this talk, I will review the physics of the depletion interaction, 
demonstrating how it can profoundly  influence  the properties of 
several systems at the interface between bio- and soft-matter physics. 
This mechanism of “attraction through repulsion”, quite general in 
multi-component systems where different species intermingle and mutually 
exclude their volumes, will be  proved to be the key determinant of the 
complex phase behaviour of colloid-polymer mixtures [1] as well as the 
responsible for a dramatic change in the conformational and 
self-entanglement properties of a macromolecule in a crowded environment 
[2]. To this end, I will also present and discuss some efficient and 
rigorous coarse-graining methodologies [3] which, retaining only the 
relevant degrees of freedom,  allow to explore the large-scale behaviour 
of these systems while reducing their complexity from a computational  
perspective.

[1]G. D’Adamo, A. Pelissetto and C. Pierleoni, J. Chem. Phys. 141, 
024902 (2014).
[2]G. D’Adamo and C. Micheletti, Macromolecules 48, 6337 (2015)
[3]G. D’Adamo, A. Pelissetto and C. Pierleoni, Soft Matter, 8, 5151 (2011).





-- 
Erica Sarnataro
Group Secretary
Quantitative Life Sciences
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
Trieste,  Italy
Tel. +39-040-2240623
e-mail: qls at ictp.it