Related papers: Homochirality: a prerequisite or consequence of li…
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…
Chirality is ubiquitous from microscopic to macroscopic phenomena in physics and biology, such as fermionic interactions and DNA duplication. In photonics, chirality has traditionally represented differentiated optical responses for right…
The aim of this paper is to underline conditions necessary for the emergence and development of life. They are placed at local planetary scale, at Galactic scale and within the cosmological evolution, as pointed out by the Anthropic…
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…
The origin of life is shrouded in mystery, with few surviving clues, obscured by evolutionary competition. Previous reviews have touched on the complementary approaches of top-down and bottom-up synthetic biology to augment our…
Biological activities are often seen entrained onto the day-night and other celestial mechanical cycles (e.g., seasonal and lunar), but studies on the origin of life have largely not accounted for such periodic external environmental…
Formamide (NH$_2$CHO) has been identified as a potential precursor of a wide variety of organic compounds essential to life, and many biochemical studies propose it likely played a crucial role in the context of the origin of life on our…
Chirality is a concept that one object is not superimposable on its mirror image by translation and rotation. In particular, chiral plasmonics have been widely investigated due to their excellent optical chiral properties, and have led to…
In a multiverse setting, we expect to be situated in a universe that is exceptionally good at producing life. Though the conditions for what life needs to arise and thrive are currently unknown, many will be tested in the coming decades.…
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…
To study the establishment of homochirality observed in the crystal growth experiment of chiral molecules from a solution under grinding, we extend the lattice gas model of crystal growth as follows. A lattice site can be occupied by a…
The search for extraterrestrial life hinges on identifying biosignatures, often focusing on gaseous metabolic byproducts as indicators. However, most such biosignatures require assuming specific metabolic processes. It is widely recognized…
Understanding chirality transfer from the molecular to the macroscopic scale poses a significant challenge in soft and biological condensed matter physics. Many nanorods of biological origin not only have chiral molecular features but also…
The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of…
Chirality is a fundamental feature in all domains of nature, ranging from particle physics over electromagnetism to chemistry and biology. Chiral objects lack a mirror plane and inversion symmetry and therefore cannot be spatially aligned…
We propose a novel definition of life in terms of which its emergence in the universe is expected, and its ever-creative open-ended evolution is entailed by no law. Living organisms are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic Closure,…
One of the deepest unsolved puzzles of subatomic physics is why Nature prefers the left particles to the right ones. Mirror matter is an attempt to understand this mystery by assuming the existence of a "parallel''world where this…
The building blocks of life, amino acids and nucleobases, are believed to have been synthesized in the extreme conditions that prevail in space starting from simple molecules containing hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. However, the…
The origin of life on Earth via the spontaneous emergence of a protocell prior to Darwinian evolution remains a fundamental open question in physics and chemistry. Here, we develop a conceptual framework based on information theory and…
Recent detections of potentially habitable exoplanets around sunlike stars demand increased exploration of the physical conditions that can sustain life, by whatever methods available. Insight into these conditions can be gained by…