The heavy metal cadmium is a dangerous environmental toxicant that can be lethal to humans and other organisms. This paper demonstrates that cadmium is lethal to the ciliated protozoan Paramecium tetraurelia and that a circadian clock modulates the sensitivity of the cells to cadmium. Various concentrations of cadmium were shown to increase the number of behavioral responses, decrease the swimming speed of cells, and generate large vacuole formation in cells prior to death. Cells were grown in either 12-h light/12-h dark or constant dark conditions exhibited a toxic response to 500 muM CdCl(2); the sensitivity of the response was found to vary with a 24-h periodicity. Cells were most sensitive to cadmium at circadian time 0 (CT0), while they were least sensitive in the early evening (CT12). This rhythm persisted even when the cells were grown in constant dark. The oscillation in cadmium sensitivity was shown to be temperature-compensated; cells grown at 18 degrees C and 28 degrees C had a similar 24-h oscillation. Finally, phase shifting experiments demonstrated a phase-dependent response to light. These data establish the criteria required for a circadian clock and demonstrate that P. tetraurelia possesses a circadian-influenced regulatory component of the cadmium toxic response. The Paramecium system is shown to be an excellent model system for the study of the effects of biological rhythms on heavy metal toxicity.

These lecture notes give a basic introduction to the physics of phase transitions under non-equilibrium conditions. The notes start with a general introduction to non-equilibrium statistical mechanics followed by four parts. The first one discusses the universality class of directed percolation, which plays a similar role as the Ising model in equilibrium statistical physics. The second one gives an overview about other universality classes which have been of interest in recent years. The third part extends the scope to models with long-range interactions, including memory effects and the so-called Lévy flights. Finally, the fourth part is concerned with deposition–evaporation phenomena leading to wetting transitions out of equilibrium.

We show that the two-dimensional voter model, usually considered to be only a marginal coarsening system, represents a broad class of models for which phase ordering takes place without surface tension. We argue that voter-like growth is generically observed at order-disorder nonequilibrium transitions solely driven by interfacial noise between dynamically symmetric absorbing states.

This review addresses recent developments in non-equilibrium statistical physics. Focusing on phase transitions from fluctuating phases into absorbing states, the universality class of directed percolation is investigated in detail. The survey gives a general introduction to various lattice models of directed percolation and studies their scaling properties, field-theoretic aspects, numerical techniques, as well as possible experimental realizations. In addition, several examples of absorbing-state transitions which do not belong to the directed percolation universality class will be discussed. As a closely related technique, we investigate the concept of damage spreading. It is shown that this technique is ambiguous to some extent, making it impossible to define chaotic and regular phases in stochastic non-equilibrium systems. Finally, we discuss various classes of depinning transitions in models for interface growth which are related to phase transitions into absorbing states.