Research in the field of "stochastic thermodynamics" has uncovered a set of fundamental relationships between energy, information, and temporal irreversibility in nonequilibrium stochastic processes. Recently, these relationships have been used to derive thermodynamic bounds on the performance of molecular machines, including very general tradeoffs such as “thermodynamic uncertainty relations” and “thermodynamic speed limits”. I will review the basics of the field, as well as some promising recent developments and applications to molecular-scale biological systems. I will also discuss the challenges faced when applying these approaches at the cellular scale.

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