Nianyuan Shi , Yufei Ma , Ning Liu , Yi Lv , Feng Xu
{"title":"Mechanomedicine in anastomosis: Bridging biomechanics and clinical outcomes for improved surgical healing","authors":"Nianyuan Shi , Yufei Ma , Ning Liu , Yi Lv , Feng Xu","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.008","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Anastomosis is a critical surgical procedure for reconnecting the tissue ends. Despite progress in surgical techniques, complications such as leaks and strictures still pose serious health risks. Most traditional approaches primarily focus on tissue alignment and perfusion. However, they often overlook the influence of mechanical cues on healing process. In this review, we introduce the concept of mechanomedicine that is a new field for integration of biomechanics and mechanobiology to guide cellular responses and tissue regeneration during anastomosis. We summarize the mechanical characteristics of different anastomotic techniques, including the type and level of mechanical forces generated at the repair site. In addition, we explore how these mechanical cues affect signaling pathways, such as Piezo1, TRPV4, and YAP/TAZ that are essential for hemostasis, inflammation, and tissue regeneration during the anastomotic healing process. By evaluating conventional and emerging anastomotic techniques, we reveal how distinct mechanical cues influence clinical outcomes. Finally, we highlight the potential of artificial intelligence and robotic systems that may help to optimize the mechanical microenvironment, predict complications, and personalize treatments. This review will establishe a novel mechanomedicine-driven framework for anastomosis, aiming to utilize biomechanics and mechanobiology for enhancing surgical precision and improving patient outcomes.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 123-141"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145262339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On not forgetting: Comment on “Thoughts and thinkers: On the complementarity between objects and processes” by Fields and Levin","authors":"Pamela Lyon","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 120-122"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145216614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Homo informatio”","authors":"Michael J. Walker","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.007","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.007","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A phylogenetic split ∼7.5 Ma (million years ago) separated paninan ancestors that were unlike today's chimpanzees, from homininan ancestors that were unlike <em>Homo sapiens</em> today; neither had evolved into their modern physical and behavioural forms. Those paninans gave rise to the mainly frugivorous woodland-dwelling chimpanzees (<em>Pan troglodytes</em>), whose multifemale-multimale troops have social hierarchies where prominent parts are played by promiscuous males whose female offspring have little choice after menarche but to seek sexual partners in other troops, hostility between troops notwithstanding, whilst male promiscuity is incompatible with paternal interest in their offspring, interest being provided mainly by mothers or female alloparents. Contrary to widespread conjecture that the social arrangements of <em>Pan</em> were those of primaeval homininans, it is proposed here that ∼4 Ma the nature of the mosaic landscapes (of grasslands and stands of trees) that were the habitat of australopithecine homininans, had 4 consequences that impinged on homininan evolution, differentiating it from that of woodland-dwelling paninans: (1) The diversity of whatever was available to eat was not the same in adjoining habitats of homininan social units, each of which may have been constrained by whatever mostly could be foraged, scavenged, eaten, or carried away, within perhaps a 2-hour walk; (2) Whatever was forageable, scavengeable, and edible within that distance likely was limited at any period of the year, so social units were increasingly omnivorous and <em>necessarily small</em>; (3) <em>Smallness</em> demanded <em>cognitive ingenuity</em> and <em>transmissibility of existential information</em> acquired by <em>active inference</em> generated by self-evidencing through enacted neuroethological behavioural responses, in line with the free energy principle, thanks to the cognitive <em>broadening</em> of <em>homininan “zones of bounded surprisal”</em> (<em>ZBS</em>) with respect to <em>paninans' ZBS,</em> both <em>within</em> each homininan “<em>small-world</em>” social unit and <em>between</em> nearby homininan units spreading out, in space and time, as budding very <em>small-world</em> information networks; (4) The <em>existential continuity</em> of small homininan social units depended on cooperation and sporadic collaboration between social units with mixed-sex philopatry (perhaps present ∼4 Ma among <em>Australopithecus anamensis</em>), behaviour which, together with (a) the generation of <em>information</em> within each unit that is enhanced by the intimate proximity to toddlers and children of older females and males in small mixed-sex social units<em>,</em> and (b) mixed-sex dispersal of sexually-active partners establishing mixed-sex social units at newly-formed localities nearby, was behaviour that maintained not only heterozygosity, but also, <em>crucial cognitive awareness of kinship links favouring transmissibility o","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 98-119"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145216572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond stimulus-centric, dualist and modular theories of cognitive control: fact or fiction? Comment on “Active inference and cognitive control: Balancing deliberation and habits through precision optimization” by Riccardo Proietti, Thomas Parr, Alessia Tessari, Karl Friston, & Giovanni Pezzulo","authors":"Francisco Barceló","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 95-97"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145118355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cognitive control under active inference: from habits to metacognition. Comment on \"Active inference and cognitive control: Balancing deliberation and habits through precision optimization” by Riccardo Proietti, Thomas Parr, Allessia Tessari, Karl Friston & Giovanni Pezzulo","authors":"Anna-Lena Eckert","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 92-94"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145099704","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sensing the unsensed: Ionizing radiation at the boundaries of human perception","authors":"Marco Durante","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 90-91"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145059901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Heiko I. Stecher , Daniel Strüber , Christoph S. Herrmann
{"title":"Modeling network connectivity may reveal further insights on how transcranial alternating current stimulation modulates brain activity","authors":"Heiko I. Stecher , Daniel Strüber , Christoph S. Herrmann","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.08.013","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.08.013","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 87-89"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145045588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Balancing objects and processes: advocating pluralism in biology: Comment on “Thoughts and thinkers: On the complementarity between objects and processes\" by Chris Fields and Michael Levin","authors":"Soumya Banerjee","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 79-82"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145004753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Francesco Donnarumma , Mirco Frosolone , Giovanni Pezzulo
{"title":"Integrating large language models and active inference to understand eye movements in reading and dyslexia","authors":"Francesco Donnarumma , Mirco Frosolone , Giovanni Pezzulo","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.08.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.08.008","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We present a novel computational model employing hierarchical active inference to simulate reading and eye movements. The model characterizes linguistic processing as inference over a hierarchical generative model, facilitating predictions and inferences at various levels of granularity, from syllables to sentences. Our approach combines the strengths of large language models for realistic textual predictions and active inference for guiding eye movements to informative textual information, enabling the testing of predictions. The model exhibits proficiency in reading both known and unknown words and sentences, adhering to the distinction between lexical and nonlexical routes in dual route theories of reading. Our model therefore provides a novel approach to understand the cognitive processes underlying reading and eye movements, within a predictive processing framework. Furthermore, our model can potentially aid in understanding how maladaptive predictive processing can produce reading deficits associated with dyslexia. As a proof of concept, we show that attenuating the contribution of priors during the reading process leads to incorrect inferences and a more fragmented reading style, characterized by a greater number of shorter saccades, aligning with empirical findings regarding eye movements in dyslexic individuals. In summary, our model represents a significant advancement in comprehending the cognitive processes involved in reading and eye movements, with potential implications for understanding dyslexia in terms of maladaptive inference.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 61-78"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144996850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Physics of Life ReviewsPub Date : 2025-09-01Epub Date: 2025-07-26DOI: 10.1016/j.plrev.2025.07.022
Oshin Vartanian
{"title":"Progress is typically incremental: comment on \"Can arts-based interventions improve health? A conceptual and methodological critique\" by Martin Skov and Marcos Nadal.","authors":"Oshin Vartanian","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.07.022","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.07.022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"54 ","pages":"215-217"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144803171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}