We show that the problem of existence of a mitochondrial Eve can be understood as an application of the Galton–Watson process and presents interesting analogies with critical phenomena in Statistical Mechanics. In the approximation of small survival probability, and assuming limited progeny,...

We study the phenomenon of internal avalanching within the context of recently proposed “Tetris” lattice models for granular media. We consider a packing of particles subjected to two different dynamics. In the first case, we arrest the system at different instances during an “aging”...

A wide variety of processes are thought to show “long-range persistence”, specifically an autocorrelation function with power-law decay. A variety of methods have been proposed to quantify this power-law decay, and weather and climate systems, among others, have been claimed to show...