Need of physics in cell biology

Physics and cell biology used to be very distinct fields, but now a days, more and more theoretical physics oriented work force moved to this domain and life sciences, specially from statistical mechanics and complex systems point of view, and even people from string theory! A recent article that reviews this perspective appeared [link].
In the similar lines in the article [link] discussion on physics role in biology in generic terms explored. In a humorous way current funding policies are summarized : "all science is either biology or tool-making for biology or not fundable".

Random Walk in Confined Diffusion

A recent work explores a theory of random walk in Confined environment [link].

Equivalence of replica and cavity methods

Replica and cavity methods appear [link] in tackling problems with spin glasses and related optimization. A recent work shown the equivalence of these two methods in the context of random networks [link].

Stochastic blockmodels: Graph representations and Community Detection

Partitioning a graph and its efficient representation appear to have an increasing importance, due to its implications in complex networks i.e. social networks. One important model that is utilized is called Stochastic blockmodels [link] where attributes of connections generates certain classification (blocks) that leads to a reduced representation or inherent partions. A recent work by Newman generalizes this model to real networks to detect communities [link], by taking into account the variation in the vertex degree.

Minimizing Polynomial Functions

A recent work appear on arXiv [link] introduced a method to globally minimize multivariate polynomials which bridges mathematical programming and algebraic geometry. There is a popular article on this [link].

Sampling in rare events under non-equilibrium conditions

In a recent work, reported by Berryman-Schilling proposes a novel method for calculating the time-series of the probability of a rare event in non-equilibrium conditions [link]. The main contribution of this work lies in the modification of  Pruned-enriched Rosenbluth method, where they call this new algorithm S-PRES. This work might be an interesting  advancement while it does not assume a prior knowledge on the transition paths itself.

Optimal random search

A recent work shows how to exploit a priori distribution in random search.It is shown that square of the distribution must be selected as a search distribution [pre][arxiv].