Related papers: Cause of Chirality Consensus
Groups of cells, including clusters of cancerous cells, multicellular organisms, and developing organs, may both grow and break apart. What physical factors control these fractures? In these processes, what sets the eventual size of…
How chirality propagates across scales remains an open question in many biological and synthetic systems. An especially clear manifestation of this propagation is found in in vitro gliding assays of cytoskeletal filaments on surfaces,…
Apparent biodiversity on earth exists only if we compare different species separated from their environments. Meanwhile coexisting species have to be identical in terms of energetic interactions. Consider the biosphere as a network of…
The evolution of structure in biology is driven by accretion and change. Accretion brings together disparate parts to form bigger wholes. Change provides opportunities for growth and innovation. Here we review patterns and processes that…
We provide a critical overview of the theory of the chirality-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect, i.e., phenomena in which the chirality of molecular species imparts significant spin selectivity to various electron processes. Based on…
Understanding the thermodynamic function of life may shed light on its origin. Life, as are all irreversible processes, is contingent on entropy production. Entropy production is a measure of the rate of the tendency of Nature to explore…
Equilibrium bifurcation in natural systems can sometimes be explained as a route to stress shielding for preventing failure. Although compressive buckling has been known for a long time, its less-intuitive tensile counterpart was only…
Chirality is of primary importance in many areas of chemistry and has been extensively investigated since its discovery. We introduce here the description of central chirality for tetrahedral molecules using a geometrical approach based on…
The paper starts with the proposal that the cause of the apparent insolubility of the free-will problem are several popular but strongly metaphysical notions and hypotheses. To reduce the metaphysics, some ideas are borrowed from physics. A…
In many biological materials with a hierarchical structure there is an intriguing and unique mechanism responsible for the 'propagation' of order from the molecular to the nano- or micro-scale level. Here we present a much simpler molecular…
To understand the chirality selection in the biological organic system, a simple lattice model of chemical reaction with molecular diffusion is proposed and studied by Monte Carlo simulations. In addition to a simple stochastic process of…
Aging is a universal consequence of life, yet researchers have identified no universal theme. This manuscript considers aging from the perspective of entropy, wherein things fall apart. We first examine biological information change as a…
The so called "globalization" process (i.e. the inexorable integration of markets, currencies, nation-states, technologies and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole) has a behavior exactly equivalent to a system that…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
Quantum Darwinism recognizes that decoherence imprints redundant records of preferred quasi-classical pointer states on the environment. These redundant records are then accessed by observers. We show how redundancy enables and even implies…
Chiral symmetry breaking is ubiquitous in biological systems, from DNA to bacterial suspensions. A key unresolved problem is how chiral structures may spontaneously emerge from achiral interactions. We study a simple model of bacterial…
The purpose of the paper is five-fold: (a) Argue that the question in the title can be presented in a meaningful manner and that it requires an answer. (b) Discuss the conventional answers and explain why they are unsatisfactory. (c)…
Synthetic and biological living polymers are self-assembling chains whose chain length distributions (CLDs) are dynamic. We show these dynamics are ultrasensitive: even a small perturbation (e.g. temperature jump) non-linearly distorts the…
A cardinal feature common to embryonic development and tissue reorganization, as well as to wound healing and cancer cell invasion, is collective cellular migration. During collective migratory events the phenomena of cell jamming and…
Theoretical analysis proves that human survivability is dominated by an unusual physical, rather than biological, mechanism, which yields an exact law. The law agrees with all experimental data, but, contrary to existing theories, it is the…