Meroz Lab

We are advertising the prestigious Hooke Fellowship at the Mathematical Institute in Oxford. We are looking for the very best applied mathematicians out there. Please send the information around. www.maths.ox.ac.uk/node/85974

The future of biology is not just about collecting more data, but also about uncovering new principles and deriving new understanding. Theory and expts go hand in hand! See www.asimov.press/p/theory-bio... Excited that Theory & Concepts is back for the 3rd edition: come join us at EMBL next July!!

In the early 1900s, Emmy Noether explored the mathematical consequences of symmetries. In doing so, she shook the very foundations of fundamental physics. https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-noethers-theorem-revolutionized-physics-20250207/

A “side effect” of growing roots🌱: Beautiful architectural structures 🏛️ A confining space effectively coordinates root growth in this collective vertiginous spiral.

yes so happy for him!!! this is exactly why we do curiosity-driven science... #chlamydomonas #protistsonsky Funders and universities are you watching...???

Fireflies “have been doing computer science well before we even existed.” — Andrew Moiseff, a biologist at the University of Connecticut https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-do-fireflies-flash-in-sync-studies-suggest-a-new-answer-20220920/

So cool!

🌱 We introduce Segment Any Plant (SAP) in @jxbotany.bsky.social Alex Abbey developed a framework for plant image segmentation that works without task-specific training 🪩 Building on foundation vision model SAM2, SAP can segment and track growing plants across time and z-stacks tinyurl.com/4uw64paf

This house is like doing research 😅

In a future where AI scientists run their own labs, Jonathon Keats and I argue they should learn from more than human minds. Our new essay in @nautil.us asks: What can ants, pigeons, and chimpanzees teach AI about doing better science? nautil.us/a-natural-so...

Optical illusions provide a window into underlying rules of perception in a sensory system. What illusions affect single cells? Plants?…

Our article “Time-dependent bistability leads to critical slowing down during floral transition in Arabidopsis” is now published in @natcomms.nature.com. Link: rdcu.be/fBZ3S. What an exciting collaboration with the Coupland lab! @mpipz.bsky.social @ceplas.bsky.social #PlantDevelopment #criticality

Plant braiding 🪴 🪢 Young "searcher" shoots of climbing plants twine on each others, increasing their collective stiffness 🧞‍♂️, thus increasing their reach 🤘, allowing to find supports farther away. 💡 So smart! Central Park, New York.

📏 How many distinct length scales can you spot here? I think I see 3… ⏳ Granular media people - what sets this? (or am I wrong and it’s in my head) Beautiful Great Sand Dunes in Colorado!

Determination (solitary flower in the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado)

Determination (solitary flower in the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado)

Yesterday I visited @oritpeleg.bsky.social’s apiary at Boulder, and was super super lucky to witness bees swarming back to the hive 🐝 ! The tense smile is somewhere between super excited and super nervous about the bees on my face net....

Check out our Review on #AFM in plants now on @jxbotany.bsky.social !

Looking forwards! And i am sticking around Boulder for a couple of weeks if anyone wants to chat 😁

Ever stretch a plastic bag until it wrinkled? Keeping a thin sheet flat while it rapidly expands is surprisingly difficult. So how do growing plant leaves remain flat as they rapidly grow? Check out our new @currentbiology.bsky.social review, How to Grow a Flat Leaf www.cell.com/current-biol...

Underwater aliens? Beautiful byproducts of a spherification demo 😅

Fireflies “have been doing computer science well before we even existed.” — Andrew Moiseff, a biologist at the University of Connecticut quantamagazine.org/how-do-firef...

🔬 This week in my course “Physics of Living Systems - in the Lab and Kitchen”, we explored viscosity & its microscopic origins. 👨‍🍳 Chef Yaniv Gur Arieh demonstrated different methods for sauce thickening: emulsions, gelatinization, reduction & modernist polymers. So much (tasty) soft matter physics!

Plants are everywhere 🌳 but rarely thought of as computing. New review (preprint 🪩 lnkd.in/d5KwzzPN): plants sense, compute, and move without a brain - via growth, combining physical computation, embodied intelligence & functional noise. A physics view of decentralized behavior in living matter 🌱

🥐 Master Baker Yuval Elhadeff shows how dough elasticity is manipulated by changing network properties of gluten! 🪩 1st demo in my course ”Physics of living systems, lab+kitchen”. When we cook we manipulate bio tissue with processes rooted in physics. More to come!

28 months later: In December 2024, I participated in the Ernst Strüngmann Forum on #Navigation #Research 🧭🧪 Now the book has been published including our chapter of group 2 ("team zoo" 🦠🐜🐦🦞🐒🦍🐢🤖) on the "Universal Principles of Navigation across Species and Spatial Scales" ↘️ doi.org/10.1007/978-... ↙️

Preprint 🌱 Plants build nonlinear vectorial representations of light patterns! Surprising results: Opposing cues cancel, so plants grow towards a weaker tie-breaker light. Plants respond to sum of transduced signals, not physical sum of light: optical “illusions”! 🪩 tinyurl.com/44f83xh8

Honeybee swarms do not come together and fall apart in the same way 🐝 In this new preprint led by Danielle Chase, we report how to trick swarms to repeatedly assemble and disassemble in front of our cameras, while tracking individual bees in 3D! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New preprint 🌱 Segment plants in time-series images using foundation model SAM2 - without training a model 🪩. Magician Alex Abbey! 💡SAP works across species, scales, and even z-stacks. From single cells to whole plants→ quantitative growth & dynamics . tinyurl.com/3raedtvm @biosofttau.bsky.social

🌱 “To twine or not to twine?” Preprint 🪩 Plants use inherent circular movements (circumnuations) for active sensing of support mechanical stability (eg whisking 🐭), twining occurs at a torque threshold. Heroic experiments by Amir Ohad, fancy simulations @amirporat.bsky.social: tinyurl.com/2syh4ny3

#LivingArchitectures Congratulations @manuelthery.bsky.social @lblanchoin.bsky.social and all Scientists of the #CytoMorphoLab for their poetic vision of the microscopic level.

✨ New preprint from the lab on firefly synchronization, led by Owen Martin (freshly Dr. Martin!), with Nataliya Nechyporenko and Kaushik Jayaram. Our measured firefly phase-response curves reveal excitatory and inhibitory timing rules that facilitate population synchrony ✨ doi.org/10.64898/202...

Job alert🚨I am advertising a 2-year postdoctoral position to work on the mathematics of plant morphogenesis @mpipz.bsky.social. Candidates with interests in mathematical modelling, mechanics, or biophysics are strongly encouraged to apply. 🌱Reposts are appreciated! jobs.mpipz.mpg.de/jobposting/4...

Artist+friend Liat Segal and I gave a fun talk at TRANSMEET Art+Science Festival (www.transmeet-festival.org ) "Art–science collaborations: Generators of new ideas and serendipitous events" (based on our paper bit.ly/4ohpuHu) After all, both artists & scientists are driven by asking questions

It's funny how in space all intuition about basic stuff - like water - goes out the window

We’re hiring! 🚨 Assistant Professor (TT) in Theoretical or Computational Biological Physics @univmiami.bsky.social 😀 Come build the future of interdisciplinary biophysics with us! Apply by Dec 15 → tinyurl.com/5n9bk836 #Biophysics #PhysicsJobs #AcademicJobs #UMiami

Call for Applications for the Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellowship-2026-27 azrielifoundation.org/azrieli-fell...

New paper!💡 Amir Ohad developed this nifty setup to measure weak forces generated by freely moving plants, based on the deflection of a pendulum (straw from the cafeteria 😎), which does not require any tethering of the plant: academic.oup.com/jxb/advance-... Plant-obstacle interactions here we come!

I can what this all day.

הכנתי לסטודנטים כמה הדגמות של ויזואליזציה של פונקציות מרוכבות למי שבעניין yohai.github.io/complex

💡Best way to learn electronics and ARDUINO for lab work? 🎨In an artist’s studio of course! Inspired by her amazing work, students (and some brave PIs) joined artist & friend Liat Segal in her studio for a workshop on the basics. Thanks @biosofttau.bsky.social for help funding!

Come fly with us, let's fly, let's fly away. Full details: www.maths.ox.ac.uk/node/74169

I am super excited to announce that we have a tenure-track faculty position in biophysics open in the Department of Physics at Carnegie Mellon! 🧪 Interfolio link: apply.interfolio.com/174360 PLEASE, share widely across the blue skies! Let me briefly explain what we're looking for: 1/10

I'm really looking forward to hosting this @metagov.bsky.social seminar on the governance of bees, fireflies, and plants with my colleage @oritpeleg.bsky.social: luma.com/pzbp4zq1

Surface tension wins when there’s no gravity! I love this video