The Widened Pipe Model of plant hydraulic evolution.

Shaping global water and carbon cycles, plants lift water from roots to leaves through xylem conduits. The importance of xylem water conduction makes it crucial to understand how natural selection deploys conduit diameters within and across plants. Wider conduits transport more water but are likely more vulnerable to conduction-blocking gas embolisms and cost more for a plant to build, a tension necessarily shaping xylem conduit diameters along plant stems.

Spanning traceroutes over modular networks and general scaling degree distributions.

We analyze the class of networks characterized by modular structure where a sequence of l Erdös-Renyi random networks of size Nl with random average degrees is joined by links whose structure must remain immaterial. We find that traceroutes spanning the entire macronetwork exhibit scaling degree distributions P(k) approximately k-gamma, where gamma depends on how the degrees of the joined clusters are distributed. We thus suggest that yet another mechanism for the dynamic origin of arbitrary power-law degree distributions observed in natural and artificial networks, many of which belong to the range 2 View Article and Find Full Text PDF