Related papers: Triggering A Climate Change Dominated "Anthropocen…
Genetic information and environmental factors determine the path of an individuals life and therefore, the evolution of its entire species. We have succeeded in proposing and studying a model that captures this idea. In our model, a…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
After Earth's origin, our host star, the Sun, was shining 20 to 25 percent less brightly than today. Without greenhouse-like conditions to warm the atmosphere, our early planet would have been an ice ball and life may never have evolved.…
Along with the accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the loss of primary forests and other natural ecosystems is a major disruption of the Earth system causing global concern. Quantifying planetary warming from carbon emissions,…
Our present-day atmosphere is often used as an analog for potentially habitable exoplanets, but Earth's atmosphere has changed dramatically throughout its 4.5 billion year history. For example, molecular oxygen is abundant in the atmosphere…
It is proposed, based on the Landau-Ginzburg Theory of phase transitions, that the transition of the Earth System from the stable conditions of the Holocene to the human driven condition of the Anthropocene is, actually, a phase transition,…
We apply hydrodynamic evaporation models to different synthetic planet populations that were obtained from a planet formation code based on a core-accretion paradigm. We investigated the evolution of the planet populations using several…
The thermodynamic approach shows that the total energy produced by humanity disrupts the thermal balance of the planet and causes counteraction, that is, climate change, which can slow down the progress of civilization. This outcome not…
We explore how questions related to developing a sustainable human civilization can be cast in terms of astrobiology. In particular we show how ongoing astrobiological studies of the coupled relationship between life, planets and their…
The evolution of different forms of photosynthetic life has profoundly altered the activity level of the biosphere, radically reshaping the composition of Earth's oceans and atmosphere over time. However, the mechanistic impacts of a…
With the increasing number of exoplanets discovered, statistical properties of the population as a whole become unique constraints on planet formation models provided a link between the description of the detailed processes playing a role…
Macroevolution is considered as a problem of stochastic dynamics in a system with many competing agents. Evolutionary events (speciations and extinctions) are triggered by fitness records found by random exploration of the agents' fitness…
The search for habitable exoplanets inspires the question - how do habitable planets form? Planet habitability models traditionally focus on abiotic processes and neglect a biotic response to changing conditions on an inhabited planet. The…
Humans are the ultimate ecosystem engineers who have profoundly transformed the world's landscapes in order to enhance their survival. Somewhat paradoxically, however, sometimes the unforeseen effect of this ecosystem engineering is the…
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports indicate that the global mean temperature is about one-degree Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, that this increase is anthropogenic, and that there is a causal relationship…
Despite the increase in observational data on exoplanets, the processes that lead to the formation of planets are still not well understood. But thanks to the high number of known exoplanets, it is now possible to look at them as a…
The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Climate change is the long-term shift in global weather patterns, largely caused by anthropogenic activity of greenhouse gas emissions. Global climate temperatures have unmistakably risen and naturally occurring climate variability alone…