Related papers: The C-value enigma and timing of the Cambrian expl…
According to the "hard-steps" model, the origin of humanity required "successful passage through a number of intermediate steps" (so-called "hard" or "critical" steps) that were intrinsically improbable with respect to the total time…
The timing and duration of the reionization epoch is crucial to the emergence and evolution of structure in the universe. The relative roles that star-forming galaxies, active galactic nuclei and quasars play in contributing to the…
Giant impacts by comets and asteroids have probably had an important influence on terrestrial biological evolution. We know of around 180 high velocity impact craters on the Earth with ages up to 2400Myr and diameters up to 300km. Some…
The concept of freeze out volume used in many statistical approaches for disassembly of hot nuclei leads to ambiguities. The fragmentation pattern and the momentum distribution (temperature) of the emanated fragments are determined by the…
Molecular clock (MC) is a central concept of molecular evolution according to which each gene evolves at a characteristic, near constant rate. Numerous evolutionary studies have demonstrated the validity of MC but also have shown that MC is…
To anyone who has read a scientific journal or even a newspaper in the last six months, it might appear that cosmic gamma-ray bursts hold no more mysteries: they are cosmological, and possibly the most powerful explosions in the Universe.…
The evolution of life has been a big enigma despite rapid advancements in the fields of biochemistry, astrobiology, and astrophysics in recent years. The answer to this puzzle has been as mind-boggling as the riddle relating to evolution of…
Novae are thermonuclear explosions on the surface of accreting white dwarfs and are key laboratories for studying explosive nucleosynthesis, particle acceleration, shock physics, and binary evolution. Despite major progress driven by…
Darwin's theory of evolution is considered to be one of the greatest scientific gems in modern science. It not only gives us a description of how living things evolve, but also shows how a population evolves through time and also, why only…
Evolutionary crystal structure prediction proved to be a powerful approach for studying a wide range of materials. Here, we present a specifically designed algorithm for the prediction of the structure of complex crystals consisting of…
The nature of the future is completely different from the nature of the past. When quantum effects are significant, the future shows all the signs of quantum weirdness, including duality, uncertainty, and entanglement. With the passage of…
It is a mystery why the density of matter and the density of vacuum energy are nearly equal today when they scale so differently during the expansion of the Universe. We suggest a paradigm that might allow for a non-anthropic solution to…
Nuclear reactions drive the stellar evolution and contribute to the stellar and galactic chemicals abundances. New determinations of the nuclear reaction rates for key fusion reactions of stellar evolution are now available, paving the way…
Giant double-stranded DNA viruses (such as record breaking Acanthamoeba polyphaga Mimivirus), with particle sizes of 0.2 to 0.6 micron, genomes of 300 kbp to 1.200 kbp, and commensurate complex gene contents, constitute an evolutionary…
After a short history of the $\Lambda$-term it is explained why the (effective) cosmological constant is expected to obtain contributions from short-distance-physics, corresponding to an energy scale of at least 100 GeV. The actual tiny…
Genomic data are rapidly resolving the tree of living species calibrated to time, the timetree of life, which will provide a framework for research in diverse fields of science. Previous analyses of taxonomically restricted timetrees have…
The decisive role of Embryology in understanding the evolution of animal forms is founded and deeply rooted in the history of science. It is recognized that the emergence of multicellularity would not have been possible without the…
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Drake formula, it appears interesting to briefly review the history of Astrobiology from the origins up to the epoch of the Drake formula. After recalling the main steps of this history during…
Since Newton, all classical and quantum physics depends upon the "Newtonian Paradigm". Here the relevant variables of the system are identified. The boundary conditions creating the phase space of all possible values of the variables are…
The evolution of a vacuum component of the Universe is investigated in the quantum as well as the classical regimes. Probably our Universe has arisen as a vacuum fluctuation and very probably that it has had a high symmetry for Planckian…