Related papers: The Engine of Life
Electricity in the atmosphere provides an ideal topic for educational outreach in environmental science. To support this objective, a simple instrument to measure real atmospheric electrical parameters has been developed and its performance…
The ability of a planet to maintain surface water, key to life as we know it, depends on solar and planetary energy. As a star ages, it delivers more energy to a planet. As a planet ages it produces less internal heat, which leads to…
The study of planets beyond the solar system and the search for other habitable planets and life is just beginning. Ground-based (radial velocity and transits) and space-based surveys (transits and astrometry) will identify planets spanning…
Solar cells are engines converting energy supplied by the photon flux into work. All known types of macroscopic engines and turbines are also self-oscillating systems which yield a periodic motion at the expense of a usually non-periodic…
Does life exist outside our Solar System? A first step towards searching for life outside our Solar System is detecting life on Earth by using remote sensing applications. One powerful and unambiguous biosignature is the circular…
The understanding of the fundamental properties of the climate system has long benefitted from the use of simple numerical models able to parsimoniously represent the essential ingredients of its processes. Here we introduce a new model for…
Earth-Like is an interactive website and twitter bot that allows users to explore changes in the average global surface temperature of an Earth-like planet due to variations in the surface oceans and emerged land coverage, rate of volcanism…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
A mission to view the solar poles from high helio-latitudes (above 60$^\circ$) will build on the experience of Solar Orbiter as well as a long heritage of successful solar missions and instrumentation (e.g. SOHO \cite{SOHO}, STEREO…
This paper is organized into four chapters. The first chapter observes how decoupling labor from ownership of the output produced by that labor is equivalent to building an engine that is incentivized to generate the maximum energy output,…
Understanding the concept of habitability is related to an evolutionary knowledge of the particular planet-in-question. Additional indications so-called "systemic aspects" of the planetary system as a whole governs a particular planet's…
The diversity of planetary systems that have been discovered are revealing the plethora of possible architectures, providing insights into planet formation and evolution. They also increase our understanding of system parameters that may…
Determining planetary habitability is a complex matter, as the interplay between a planet's physical and atmospheric properties with stellar insolation has to be studied in a self consistent manner. Standardized atmospheric models for…
Cellular automata can simulate many complex physical phenomena using the power of simple rules. The presented methodological platform expresses the concept of programmable matter in which Newtons laws of motion are one of examples. Energy…
We report on the study of student difficulties regarding heat engine in the context of Stirling cycle within upper-division undergraduate thermal physics course. An in-class test about a Stirling engine with a regenerator was taken by three…
The concept of a system-wide measure of the sustainment of life (habitability) for space-faring interplanetary species is introduced and explored. Although largely agnostic to the details of how interplanetary life might operate (e.g., via…
This paper describes a series of activities in which students investigate and use the Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic models of planetary motion. The activities guide students through using open source software to discover important…
From analytical studies of tidal heating, eclipses and planetary illumination, it is clear that the exomoon habitable zone (EHZ) - the set of moon and host planet orbits that permit liquid water on an Earthlike moon's surface - is a…
Darwinian Theory depicts life as being overwhelmingly consumed by a fight for survival in a hostile environment. However, from a thermodynamic perspective, life is a dynamic, out of equilibrium process, stabilizing and coevolving in concert…
The vertebrate motor system employs dimensionality-reducing strategies to limit the complexity of movement coordination, for efficient motor control. But when environments are dense with hidden action-outcome contingencies, movement…