Related papers: Life's Chirality From Prebiotic Environments
Understanding the condensed-phase behavior of chiral molecules is important in biology, as well as in a range of technological applications, such as the manufacture of pharmaceuticals. Here, we use molecular dynamics simulations to study a…
It is becoming widely accepted that very early in the origin of life, even before the emergence of genetic encoding, reaction networks of diverse small chemicals might have manifested key properties of life, namely self-propagation and…
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 origin of life on Earth would benefit from a prebiotic atmosphere that produced nitriles, like HCN, which enable ribonucleotide synthesis. However, geochemical evidence suggests that Hadean air was relatively oxidizing with negligible…
One of the most interesting unsolved questions in science today is the question of life on other planets. At the present time it is safe to say that we do not have much of an idea as to whether life is common or exceedingly rare in the…
Partially chiral stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds can arise from various processes in the early Universe. The gravitational ABJ anomaly links the chirality of the gravitational field to the chiral fermions, resulting in the…
Communication between cells is realized by exchange of biochemical substances. Due to internal organization of living systems and variability of external parameters, the exchange is heavily influenced by perturbations of various parameters…
Locomotion is essential for living cells. It enables bacteria and algae to explore space for food, cancer to spread, and immune system to fight infections. Motile cells display trajectories of intriguing complexity, from regular (e.g.…
In the standard model of particle physics, the chiral anomaly can occur in relativistic plasmas and plays a role in the early Universe, protoneutron stars, heavy-ion collisions, and quantum materials. It gives rise to a magnetic instability…
The spinning electromagnetic universe, known also as the Rotating Bertotti-Robinson(RBR) spacetime is considered as a model to represent our cosmos. The model derives from different physical considerations, such as colliding waves, throat…
The diversity of cell populations is regulated by extracellular and intracellular variability. The latter includes genetic, epigenetic and stochastic variability, all contributing to the experimentally observed heterogeneity in response to…
Finding life on exoplanets from telescopic observations is an ultimate goal of exoplanet science. Life produces gases and other substances, such as pigments, which can have distinct spectral or photometric signatures. Whether or not life is…
For over two decades, the role of structural chirality in spin polarization has been widely investigated, with implications for the origins of life, catalysis, and quantum phenomena. Yet, it remains unclear whether all chirality-induced…
One of the chief paradoxes of molecular oxygen (O$_2$) is that it is an essential requirement for multicellular eukaryotes on Earth while simultaneously posing a threat to their survival via the formation of reactive oxygen species. In this…
A series of astronomical observations obtained over the period 1986 to 2018 supports the idea that life is a cosmic rather than a purely terrestrial or planetary phenomenon. These include (1) the detection of biologically relevant molecules…
Recently, many Earth-sized planets have been discovered around stars other than the Sun that might possess appropriate conditions for life. The development of theoretical methods for assessing the putative habitability of these worlds is of…
Smectite clays are hydrated layer silicates that, like micas, occur naturally in abundance. Importantly, they have readily modifiable interlayer spaces that provide excellent sites for nanochemistry. Vermiculite is one such smectite clay…
Chirality is an important concept that describes the asymmetry property of a system, which usually emerges spontaneously due to mirror symmetry breaking. Such spontaneous chirality manifests predominantly as parity breaking in modern…
Recent experiments on monolayers of spindle-like cells plated on adhesive stripe-shaped domains have provided a convincing demonstration that certain types of collective phenomena in epithelia are well described by active nematic…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…