Energy and time determine scaling in biological and computer designs.

Metabolic rate in animals and power consumption in computers are analogous quantities that scale similarly with size. We analyse vascular systems of mammals and on-chip networks of microprocessors, where natural selection and human engineering, respectively, have produced systems that minimize both energy dissipation and delivery times. Using a simple network model that simultaneously minimizes energy and time, our analysis explains empirically observed trends in the scaling of metabolic rate in mammals and power consumption and performance in microprocessors across several orders of magnitude in size.

Response to Comments on "Evidence for mesothermy in dinosaurs".

D'Emic and Myhrvold raise a number of statistical and methodological issues with our recent analysis of dinosaur growth and energetics. However, their critiques and suggested improvements lack biological and statistical justification.

Testing models for the leaf economics spectrum with leaf and whole-plant traits in Arabidopsis thaliana.

The leaf economics spectrum (LES) describes strong relationships between multiple functional leaf traits that determine resource fluxes in vascular plants. Five models have been proposed to explain these patterns: two based on patterns of structural allocation, two on venation networks and one on resource allocation to cell walls and cell contents. Here we test these models using data for leaf and whole-plant functional traits.

Inclusion of vein traits improves predictive power for the leaf economic spectrum: a response to Sack et al. (2013).

Our model for the worldwide leaf economics spectrum (LES) based on venation networks (Blonder et al., 2011, 2013) was strongly criticized by Sack et al. (2013) in this journal.