Related papers: Nonlinear aspects of astrobiological research
Chirality or the property that distinguishes lefthandedness from righthandedness is an important aspect of the universe, starting from neutrinos, which are lefthanded. Fifteen years ago the author had proposed that life on the earth was…
Context. Astrobiological evolution of the Milky Way (or the shape of its "astrobiological landscape") has emerged as one of the key research topics in recent years. In order to build precise, quantitative models of the Galactic…
Human influence on the biosphere has been evident at least since the development of widespread agriculture, and some stratigraphers have suggested that the activities of modern civilization indicate a geological epoch transition. The study…
The role of asymmetry on the evolution of prebiotic homochirality is investigated in the context of autocatalytic polymerization reaction networks. A model featuring enantiometric cross-inhibition and chiral bias is used to study the…
The thermodynamic arrow-of-time problem is thought to be resolved by the observation that our universe initially was---and still is---far from equilibrium. The psychological arrow-of-time problem is often attributed the same resolution, but…
Our understanding of the processes that are relevant to the formation and maintenance of habitable planetary systems is advancing at a rapid pace, both from observation and theory. The present review focuses on recent research that bears on…
Stellar elemental abundances direct impact planetary interior structure and mineralogy, surface composition, and life. However, the different communities that are necessary for planetary habitability exploration (astrophysics, planetary…
(abridged) We review recent studies of chirality using circularly polarized light, along with the birth and evolution of life and planetary systems. Terrestrial life consists almost exclusively of one enantiomer, left-handed amino acids.…
Through in-depth thinking and reasoning about the conditions required for cells to maintain unchanged material distribution, it is concluded that life metabolic reactions require high information content. However, the self-replication of a…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
Planetary effects have been attributed to biological processes without scientific rigor. Some generic invisible slow matter from the dark Universe in the form of streams or clusters with occasional large flux enhancements due to planetary…
A key open question in the study of life is the origin of biomolecular homochirality: almost every life-form on Earth has exclusively levorotary amino acids and dextrorotary sugars. Will the same handedness be preferred if life is found…
Instructive influence of environment on heredity has been a debated topic for centuries. Darwin's identification of natural selection coupled to chance variation as the driving force for evolution, against a formal interpretation proposed…
Life can be viewed as a localized chemical system that sits on, or in the basin of attraction of, a metastable dynamical attractor state that remains out of equilibrium with the environment. Such a view of life allows that new living states…
Cells can often choose among several stably heritable phenotypes. Examples are the expression of genes in eukaryotic cells where long chromosomal regions can adopt persistent and heritable silenced or active states, that may be associated…
Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…
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…
Perhaps more than other physical sciences, astronomy is frequently statistical in nature. The objects under study are inaccessible to direct manipulation in the laboratory, so the astronomer is restricted to observing a few external…
The search for life elsewhere in the universe is a pivotal question in modern science. However, to address whether life is common in the universe we must first understand the likelihood of abiogenesis by studying the origin of life on…