Daniel Tubbenhauer on Knots and Biology

This is from a talk he gave somewhere in July 2025. Daniel Tubbenhauer With Another Knot Invariant Talk. There are some pictures from a 1985 study of knots created by E. coli Topoisomerase. In this talk he looks at ways to get abstract representations of knots and tangles from two dimensional images.

Last night I was reading chapter N of Monica Gagliano's book Thus Spoke the Plant where she described the difficulties she had when she published a paper on Mimosa pudica which showed that the plants can learn to characterise certain classes of environmental stimuli into those which are worth responding to and those which aren't. See Monica Gagliano, Michael Renton, Martial Depczynski & Stefano Mancuso Experience teaches plants to learn faster and forget slower in environments where it matters. It wasn't considered a scientific result because she didn't identify any particular biophysical/biochemical mechanism to explain the behaviour. Two years later she and co-authors Vladyslav V. Vyazovskiy, Alexander A. Borbély, Mavra Grimonprez & Martial Depczynski published Learning by Association in Plants in Nature Scientific Reports. See also Nature's editorial of 11 August 2020: Go forth and replicate and A Really Interesting Thing About Modern Computer Technology.

The CNN explainer is at https://poloclub.github.io/cnn-explainer/https://poloclub.github.io/cnn-explainer/.

This xkcd is a bit depressing: Major in The Universe:

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