Landauer discussed the minimum energy necessary for computation and stated that erasure of information is accompanied by heat generation to the amount of kT ln 2/bit. Modifying the above statement, we claim that erasure of information is accompanied by entropy generation k ln 2/bit. Some new concepts will be introduced in the field of thermodynamics that are implicitly included in our statement...

Citation: Selvarajoo K (2015) Can the second law of thermodynamics hold in cell cultures? Front. Genet. 6:262. Living systems have the ability to adapt and self-organize when challenged with drastic environmental changes. The remarkable characteristic of plasticity and collectivity allow them to evolve and survive over billions of years in a rather unpredictable manner. Observing and studying t...

Infrared signature management (IRSM) has been a primary aeronautical concern for over 50 years. Most strategies and technologies are limited by the second law of thermodynamics. In this article, IRSM is considered in light of theoretical developments over the last 15 years that have put the absolute status of the second law into doubt and that might open the door to a new class of broadband IR ...

In this paper we describe a simple vacuum spherical capacitor able to generate a macroscopic voltage between its conductors out of a single thermal source at room temperature: it is a sort of thermo-charged capacitor. The basic idea is trivial and it makes use of two cathodes with different work functions: an inner cathode with work function φ . 1 eV (for example the photo-cathode Ag–O–Cs with ...

A classical and quantum mechanical generalized second law of thermodynamics in cosmology implies constraints on the effective equation of state of the universe in the form of energy conditions, obeyed by many known cosmological solutions, and is compatible with entropy bounds which forbid certain cosmological singularities. In string cosmology the second law provides new information about the e...

Entanglement is central both to the foundations of quantum theory and, as a novel resource, to quantum information science. The theory of entanglement establishes basic laws, such as the non-increase of entanglement under local operations, that govern its manipulation and aims to draw from them formal analogies to the second law of thermodynamics. However, while in the second law the entropy un...