Related papers: 'Genesis': A takeover from field-responsive matter…

The present work is a second in the series of investigation of the background dynamics in brane cosmology when dark energy is coupled to dark matter by a suitable interaction. Here, dark matter is chosen in the form of perfect fluid with…

In this work it is investigated if fermionic sources could be responsible for accelerated periods during the evolution of a universe where a matter field would answer for the decelerated period. The self-interaction potential of the…

The transformation of organic molecules into the simplest self-replicating living system,a microorganism, is accomplished from a unique event or rare events that occurred early in the Universe. The subsequent dispersal on cosmic scales and…

The notion that the whole is more than the sum of its parts has a long tradition in science. This, of course, also applies to the Earth system. With its myriad of processes, spanning from purely physical to life and human activity, the…

The discipline of `theoretical biology' has been developing from its inception several decades ago almost in parallel with the advances in biology, so much so that the latter is often considered to be almost exclusively an empirical…

There are two dominant and contrasting classes of origin of life scenarios: those predicting that life emerged in submarine hydrothermal systems, where chemical disequilibrium can provide an energy source for nascent life; and those…

The origin of life required the emergence of metabolism, an autocatalytic network of enzymatic reactions that synthesize amino acids, nucleotides and cofactors. At the origin of metabolism there were no enzymes--how did it start? Empirical…

Granular materials such as sand, powders, and grains are omnipresent in daily life, industrial applications, and earth-science [1]. When unperturbed, they form stable structures that resemble the ones of other amorphous solids like metallic…

Soft, disordered, micro-structured materials are ubiquitous in nature and industry, and are different from ordinary fluids or solids, with unusual, interesting static and flow properties. The transition from fluid to solid -at the so-called…

Variations in the geomagnetic field occur on a vast range of time scales, from milliseconds to millions of years. The advent of satellite measurements has allowed for detailed studies of the short timescale geomagnetic field behaviour, but…

At very small scales, thermodynamic energy exchanges like work and heat become comparable to thermal energy of the system, which leads to unusual phenomena like the transient violations of Second Law. We explore the generic characters of…

It has been suggested that major transitions in evolution require the emergence of novelties, often associated to the cooperative behaviour of previously existing objects or agents. A key innovation involves the first cooperative…

In any ecosystem, the conditions of the environment and the characteristics of the species that inhabit it are entangled, co-evolving in space and time. We introduce a model that couples active agents with a dynamic environment, interpreted…

The origin of life poses a problem of combinatorial feasibility: How can temporally supported functional organization arise in exponentially branching assembly spaces when unguided exploration behaves as a memoryless random walk? We show…

Binding and unbinding of ligands to specific sites of a macromolecule are one of the most elementary molecular interactions inside the cell that embody the computational processes of biological regulations. The interaction between…

Inspired by the Penrose-Hameroff thesis, we are intuitively led to examine an intriguing correspondence of 'induction' (by fields), with the complex phenomenon of (metabolism-sustained) consciousness: Did sequences of associated induction…

We present classical density functional theory calculations of the free energy landscape for fluids below their triple point as a function of density and crystallinity. We find that for both a model globular protein and for a simple atomic…

Quantum Darwinism extends the traditional formalism of decoherence to explain the emergence of classicality in a quantum universe. A classical description emerges when the environment tends to redundantly acquire information about the…

A phenomenological approach is proposed to the problem of universe accelerated expansion and of the dark energy nature. A general class of models is introduced whose energy density depends on the redshift $z$ in such a way that a smooth…

A universal framework is proposed, where all laws are regularities of relations between things or agents. Parts of the world at one or all times are modeled as networks called SYSTEMS with a minimum of axiomatic properties. A notion of…