Couple microscale periodic patches to simulate macroscale emergent dynamics

Patch Dynamics for Multiscale Problems Bridging the Macroscale and Microscale

There are important systems—those that couple molecular dynamics with a material’s macroscale behavior or use a Boltzmann particle model to predict large-scale patterns in a fluid flow, for example—that must be modeled on relatively long time or space scales, but the dynamics can be advanced only on short time or space scales. First developed by Yannis Kevrekidis and his collaborators,1–5 patch...

Simulating macroscale brain circuits with microscale resolution

Microscale patches of nonmotile phytoplankton.

Phytoplankton cells have evolved sophisticated strategies for actively responding to environmental signals, most notably to mechanical stresses of hydrodynamic origin. A largely unanswered question, however, is the significance of these cellular responses for the largely heterogeneous spatial distribution of cells found in the oceans. Motivated by the physiological regulation of buoyancy preval...

Resolving macroscale and microscale heterogeneity in virus filtration

In this paper, we characterize the filtration and deposition profiles of a recombinant analog of Norwalk virus, an important waterborne pathogen, in packed beds of saturated quartz sand under both ‘clean-bed’ and ‘dirty-bed’ conditions. Under clean-bed conditions with NaCl as the electrolyte, the retained Norwalk virus particles decline like a power-law with depth. The power-law decay in retain...

A Spotlight on Bridging Microscale and Macroscale Human Brain Architecture

We place a spotlight on the emerging trend of jointly studying the micro- and macroscale organization of nervous systems. We discuss the pioneering studies of Ding et al. (2016) and Glasser et al. (2016) in the context of growing efforts to combine and integrate multiple features of brain organization into a multi-modal and multi-scale examination of the human brain.