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Both abiotic self-organization and biological mechanisms have been put forward as the origin of a number of geological patterns. It is important to comprehend the formation mechanisms of such structures both to understand geological…
Quantum physics is a linear theory, so it is somewhat puzzling that it can underlie very complex systems such as digital computers and life. This paper investigates how this is possible. Physically, such complex systems are necessarily…
Biology has taken strong steps towards becoming a computer science aiming at reprogramming nature after the realisation that nature herself has reprogrammed organisms by harnessing the power of natural selection and the digital prescriptive…
Single-molecule biophysics has transformed our understanding of the fundamental molecular processes involved in living biological systems, but also of the fascinating physics of life. Far more exotic than a collection of exemplars of soft…
Creativity is perhaps what most differentiates humans from other species. It involves the capacity to shift between divergent and convergent modes of thought in response to task demands. Divergent thought has been characterized as the kind…
Computation of biological processes creates great promise for everyday life and great challenges for physical scientists. Simulations of molecular dynamics appeal to biologists as a natural extension of structural biology. Once biologists…
Quantitative modeling has become an essential tool in modern biophysics, driven by advances in both experimental techniques and theoretical frameworks. Powerful high-resolution techniques now provide detailed datasets spanning molecular to…
Cognitive function requires the coordination of neural activity across many scales, from neurons and circuits to large-scale networks. As such, it is unlikely that an explanatory framework focused upon any single scale will yield a…
One of the longest standing open problems in science is how life arises from non-living matter. If it is possible to measure this transition in the lab, then it might be possible to understand the physical mechanisms by which the emergence…
If students are to successfully grapple with authentic, complex biological problems as scientists and citizens, they need practice solving such problems during their undergraduate years. Physics education researchers have investigated…
Why do some physical systems possess consciousness, while others do not? Is this a question of physics? Or is it a question of the theory of causation? Physics and the theory of causation serve different descriptive purposes, and in this…
Biosystems contain an almost infinite amount of vital important details, which together ensure their life. There are, however, some common structures and reactions in the systems: the homochirality of carbohydrates and proteins, the…
The implications of large-scale coherence in biological systems and possible links to quantum theory are only beginning to be explored. Whether quantum-like coherent phenomena are relevant, or even possible at all, at the high temperatures…
Many systems involve numerous interacting parts and the whole system can have properties that the individual parts do not. I take this novelty as the defining characteristic of an emergent property. Other characteristics associated with…
The human mind is endowed with innate primordial perceptions such as space, distance, motion, change, flow of time, matter. The field of cognitive science argues that the abstract concepts of mathematics are not Platonic, but are built in…
Explaining the origin of life requires us to explain how self-replication arises. To be specific, how can a self-replicating entity develop spontaneously from a chemical reaction system in which no reaction is self-replicating? Previously…
Neural spikes in the brain form stochastic sequences, i.e., belong to the class of pulse noises. This stochasticity is a counterintuitive feature because extracting information - such as the commonly supposed neural information of mean…
Life can be viewed as a localized chemical system that sits on, or in the basin of attraction of, a metastable dynamical attractor state that remains out of equilibrium with the environment. Such a view of life allows that new living states…
For more than 3.5 billion years, life experienced dramatic environmental extremes on Earth. These include shifts from oxygen-less to over-oxygenated atmospheres and cycling between hothouse conditions and global glaciations. Meanwhile, an…
Conceptualizing planetary habitability depends on understanding how living organisms originated and what features of environments are essential to foster abiogenesis. Estimates of the abundance of life's building blocks are confounded by…