Related papers: Synthetic circuit designs for Earth terraformation
To limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, fossil-free energy systems will be required eventually. To understand how such systems can be designed, the current state-of-the-art is to apply techno-economical optimisation…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
Climate change is profoundly affecting nearly all aspects of life on earth, including human societies, economies and health. Various human activities are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions, including data centres and other…
The role of species interactions in controlling the interplay between the stability of an ecosystem and its biodiversity is still not well understood. The ability of ecological communities to recover after a small perturbation of the…
Recent progress in self-supervision shows that pre-training large neural networks on vast amounts of unsupervised data can lead to impressive increases in generalisation for downstream tasks. Such models, recently coined as foundation…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used to create more sustainable production methods and model climate change, making it a valuable tool in the fight against environmental degradation. This paper describes the paradox of an energy-consuming…
We propose a dedicated model to assist with the life cycle analysis of emissions of scientific computing centres. The model takes into account both the embodied carbon and emissions from use, as well as other factors such as data centre…
Computer-aided design for synthetic biology promises to accelerate the rational and robust engineering of biological systems; it requires both detailed and quantitative mathematical and experimental models of the processes to (re)design,…
Standard definitions of habitability assume that life requires the presence of planetary gravity wells to stabilize liquid water and regulate surface temperature. Here the consequences of relaxing this assumption are evaluated. Temperature,…
In this paper we will try to provide a formalization of some characteristics of the development of biological systems aiming at the highest level of adequacy: justificative adequacy, that is, not only what we observe (descriptive adequacy)…
Recent analyses indicate that the amount of atmospheric CO2 required to cause dangerous climate change is at most 450 ppm, and likely less than that. Reductions of non-CO2 climate forcings can provide only moderate, albeit important,…
The global production of electric goods is at an all-time high, causing negative environmental and health impacts as well as a continuing depletion of natural resources. Considering the worsening global climate change, a transition of…
Humanity's progress in combating hunger, poverty, and child mortality is marred by escalating environmental degradation due to rising greenhouse gas emissions and climate change impacts. Despite positive developments, ecosystems are…
The history of the Earth has been marked by major ecological transitions, driven by metabolic innovation, that radically reshaped the composition of the oceans and atmosphere. The nature and magnitude of the earliest transitions, hundreds…
Humankind has spread worldwide supported by cultural and technological knowledge, but the environmental sustainability on the human niche evolution depends on a new human beings relationship with the biosphere. Human lifestyles nowadays are…
We propose a model of multispecies populations surviving on distributed resources. System dynamics are investigated under changes in abiotic factors such as the climate, as parameterized through environmental temperature. In particular, we…
We seek to model the coupled evolution of a planet and a civilization through the era when energy harvesting by the civilization drives the planet into new and adverse climate states. In this way we ask if triggering "anthropocenes" of the…
Associative learning is one of the key mechanisms displayed by living organisms in order to adapt to their changing environments. It was early recognized to be a general trait of complex multicellular organisms but also found in "simpler"…
With increased access to data and the advent of computers, the use of statistical tools and numerical simulations is becoming commonplace for ecologists. These approaches help improve our understanding of ecological phenomena and their…
Current network security systems are progressively showing their limitations. One credible estimate is that only about 45% of new threats are detected. Therefore it is vital to find a new direction that cybersecurity development should…