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With the number of confirmed rocky exoplanets increasing steadily, their characterisation and the search for exoplanetary biospheres is becoming an increasingly urgent issue in astrobiology. We aim to investigate the possibility of…
As the number of detected rocky extrasolar planets increases, the question of whether their surfaces could be habitable is becoming more pertinent. On Earth, the long-term carbonate silicate cycle is able to regulate surface temperatures…
Spatial patterns are widely observed in numerous nonequilibrium natural systems, often undergoing complex transitions and bifurcations, thereby exhibiting significant importance in many physical and biological systems such as embryonic…
The distributions of size and chemical composition in the regolith on airless bodies provides clues to the evolution of the solar system. Recently, the regolith on asteroid (25143) Itokawa, visited by the JAXA Hayabusa spacecraft, was…
The Moon-forming giant impact extensively melts and partially vaporizes the silicate Earth and delivers a substantial mass of metal to Earth's core. Subsequent evolution of the magma ocean and overlying atmosphere has been described by…
Understanding how species persist under interacting stressors is a central challenge in ecology. We develop a spatially explicit reaction-diffusion framework to investigate competing species in landscapes shaped by climate variability,…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
Metabolism displays striking and robust regularities in the forms of modularity and hierarchy, whose composition may be compactly described. This renders metabolic architecture comprehensible as a system, and suggests the order in which…
The carbon-silicate cycle regulates the atmospheric $CO_2$ content of terrestrial planets on geological timescales through a balance between the rates of $CO_2$ volcanic outgassing and planetary intake from rock weathering. It is thought to…
Conventionally, a habitable planet is one that can support liquid water on its surface. Habitability depends on temperature, which is set by insolation and the greenhouse effect, due mainly to CO2 and water vapor. The CO2 level is increased…
Any search for present or past life beyond Earth should consider the initial processes and related environmental controls that might have led to its start. As on Earth, such an understanding lies well beyond how simple organic molecules…
The metabolic activity of microbes has played an essential role in the evolution and persistence of life on Earth. Microbial metabolism plays a primary role in the flow of carbon, nitrogen and other elements through the biosphere on a…
We propose a physical model for developmental process at cellular level to discuss the mechanism of epigenetic landscape. In our simplified model, a minimal model, the network of the interaction among cells generates the landscape…
Ecologists and conservation biologists need to identify the relative importance of species to make sound management decisions and effectively allocate scarce resources. We introduce a new method, termed environ centrality, to determine the…
Life is a complex biological phenomenon represented by numerous chemical, physical and biological processes performed by a biothermodynamic system/cell/organism. Both living organisms and inanimate objects are subject to aging, a biological…
The self-organization of microbial ecosystems involves a large variety of mechanisms, ranging from biochemical signaling to population dynamics. Among these, the role of motility regulation has been little studied, despite the importance of…
In the past decades human activities caused global Earth system changes, e.g., climate change or biodiversity loss. Simultaneously, these associated impacts have increased environmental awareness within societies across the globe, thereby…
The long-term carbon cycle is vital for maintaining liquid water oceans on rocky planets due to the negative climate feedbacks involved in silicate weathering. Plate tectonics plays a crucial role in driving the long-term carbon cycle…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
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…