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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…
Breakthrough technologies increasingly shape social institutions, economic systems, and political futures. Yet models of research excellence associated with such technologies often prioritize technical performance, scalability, and…
This paper forms part of a long-term project to put field electron emission (FE) onto a better scientific basis, by seeking reliable quantitative agreement between theory and experiment, especially as regards emission-current values. The…
World models have garnered substantial interest in the AI community. These are internal representations that simulate aspects of the external world, track entities and states, capture causal relationships, and enable prediction of…
Multiple hypotheses/models have been put forward regarding the cooling history of the Earth. The search for life beyond Earth has brought these models into a new light as they connect to one of the two energy sources life can tap. The…
The goals of the astrobiology community are focussed on developing a framework for the detection of biosignatures, or evidence thereof, on objects inside and outside of our solar system. A fundamental aspect of understanding the limits of…
What is the chance we start a conversation with another civilization like our own? Our technological society produced signals that could be received by other extraterrestrial civilizations, within a sphere around us with a radius of $\sim…
Upcoming NASA astrophysics missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope will search for signs of life on planets transiting nearby stars. Doing so will require co-adding dozens of transmission spectra to build up sufficient signal to…
In support of the National Acadamies' Exoplanet Science Strategy, this whitepaper outlines key technology challenges for studying the diversity of worlds in the Galaxy and in searching for habitable planets. Observations of habitable…
While extensive guidance exists for ensuring the reproducibility of one's own study, there is little discussion regarding the reproduction and replication of external studies within one's own research. To initiate this discussion, drawing…
Open conversations are one of the most engaging forms of teaching. However, creating those conversations in educational software is a complex endeavor, especially if we want to address the needs of different audiences. While language models…
A qualitatively new, much more liberal and efficient organisation of science is proposed and justified, in connection with growing debate about further role and development of fundamental science. Although the key ideas can be explained…
As the field of Trust and Safety in digital spaces continues to grow, it has become increasingly necessary - but also increasingly complex - to collaborate on research across the academic, industry, governmental and non-governmental…
Over time, cryptographically deniable systems have come to be associated in computer-science literature with the idea of "denying" evidence in court - specifically, with the ability to convincingly forge evidence in courtroom scenarios and…
In view of the sobering findings of science, theology and to a lesser degree metaphysics is confronted with a humiliating loss, and a need for reinterpretation, of allegories and narratives which have served as guidance to the perplexed for…
Radio SETI experiments aim to test the hypothesis that extraterrestrial civilizations emit detectable signals from communication, propulsion, or other technologies. The unprecedented capabilities of next generation radio telescopes,…
The emergence of new digital technologies has allowed the study of human behaviour at a scale and at level of granularity that were unthinkable just a decade ago. In particular, by analysing the digital traces left by people interacting in…
Real networks exhibit heterogeneous nature with nodes playing far different roles in structure and function. To identify vital nodes is thus very significant, allowing us to control the outbreak of epidemics, to conduct advertisements for…
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…
The search for spectroscopic biosignatures with the next-generation of space telescopes could provide observational constraints on the abundance of exoplanets with signs of life. An extension of this spectroscopic characterization of…