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We analyze the morphology of the modern urban skyline in terms of its roughness properties. This is facilitated by a database of 10 7 building heights in cities throughout the Netherlands which allows us to compute the asymptotic height difference correlation function in each city. We find that in cities for which the height correlations display power-law scaling as a function of distance between the buildings, the corresponding roughness exponents are commensurate to the Edwards-Wilkinson and Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equations for kinetic roughening. Based on analogy to discrete deposition models, we argue that these two limiting classes emerge because of possible height restriction rules for buildings in some cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the scaling of cities' solar potentials with their number of buildings and reveal a latent dependence between the solar potential and the length of the corresponding city's road network. This scaling is shown to be valid at the grid and block levels and is attributed to a common street length distribution. Additionally, we compute the buildings' solar potential correlation function and length in order to determine the set of critical exponents typifying the urban solar potential universality class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We construct a phase-field model for collective cell migration based on a Ginzburg-Landau free-energy formulation. We model adhesion, surface tension, repulsion, coattraction, and polarization, enabling us to follow the cells' morphologies and the effect of their membranes fluctuations on collective motion. We were able to measure the tissue surface tension as a function of the individual cell cortical tension and adhesion and identify a density threshold for cell-sheet formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]