Extreme dwelling: Assembling <i>domus horribilis</i>

Coward or braveheart: extreme habitat fidelity through hypoxia tolerance in a coral-dwelling goby.

Coral reef fishes are not known for their hypoxia tolerance. The coral-dwelling goby, Gobiodon histrio, rarely leaves the shelter of its host coral colony. However, our measurements indicate that this habitat could become hypoxic on calm nights ([O(2)] minima=2-30% of air saturation) due to respiration by the coral and associated organisms. Moreover, at very low tides, the whole coral colony ca...

Self-Assembling Robots

One of the grand challenges of robotics is the design of robots that are adaptive and self-sufficient. This can be crucial for robots exposed to environments that are unstructured (in space and time) or not easily accessible for a human operator, such as the inside of a blood vessel, a collapsed building, the deep sea, or the surface of another planet.Modular reconfigurable robots are among the...

Self-Assembling Dynamical Hierarchies

This paper addresses the open problem of assembling multilevelled hierarchical structure. It presents a model of an infinitely-levelled, self-assembling dynamical hierarchy which arises from the interaction of geometric primary elements with a fixed complexity. A formal description of the presented hierarchy is derived. This quantifies the relative compression achieved by describing the system ...

Assembling Cell Ensembles

The way the hippocampus processes information and encodes memories in the form of "cell assemblies" is likely determined in part by how its circuits are wired up during development. In this issue, Xu et al. now provide new insight into how neurons arising from a single common precursor migrate to their final destination and form functionally synchronous ensembles.

Assembling the pieces