Related papers: Biolocomotion and premelting in ice
The ability to navigate in complex, inhomogeneous environments is fundamental to survival at all length scales, giving rise to the rapid development of various subfields in bio-locomotion such as the well established concept of chemotaxis.…
We explore the potential multistability of the climate for a planet around the habitable zone. We focus on conditions reminiscent to those of the Earth system, but our investigation aims at presenting a general methodology for dealing with…
During colony growth, complex interactions regulate the bacterial orientation, leading to the formation of large-scale ordered structures, including topological defects and microdomains. These structures may benefit bacterial strains,…
Sea ice harbours a rich community of well-adapted microorganisms that inhabit liquid micro-spaces where extreme conditions prevail. Currently at risk under climate change, the sea-ice microbiome holds mysteries about evolution of life on…
Bacteria invade surfaces by forming dense colonies encased in a polymer matrix. Successful settlement of founder bacteria, early microcolony development and later macroscopic spreading of these biofilms on surfaces rely on complex physical…
Extremely large deuteration of several molecules has been observed towards prestellar cores and low-mass protostars for a decade. New observations performed towards low-mass protostars suggest that water presents a lower deuteration in the…
The recent discovery of terrestrial-type organic species such as methyl formate and dimethyl ether in the cold interstellar gas has proved that the formation of organic matter in the Galaxy begins at a much earlier stage of star formation…
The locomotion of flexible membrane-like organisms on top of curved surfaces appears in different contexts and scales. Still, such dynamics have not yet been quantitatively modeled and no realization of such motion in manmade systems has…
In protoplanetary disks, the formation of planetesimals via streaming and/or gravitational instabilities requires regions with a locally enhanced dust-to-gas mass ratio. Conventionally, gas pressure maxima sustained by gas surface density…
Radio jets and the lobes they inflate are common in cool-core clusters and are known to play a critical role in regulating the heating and cooling of the intracluster medium (ICM). This is an inherently multi-scale problem, and much effort…
According to conventional wisdom, a system placed in an environment with a different temperature tends to relax to the temperature of the latter, mediated by the flows of heat and/or matter that are set solely by the temperature difference.…
This review introduces physical processes in protoplanetary disks relevant to accretion and the initial stages of planet formation. After a brief overview of the observational context, I introduce the elementary theory of disk structure and…
Laboratory experiments show that a solid-state greenhouse effect in combination with thermophoresis can efficiently erode a dust bed in a low-pressure gaseous environment. The surface of an illuminated, light absorbing dusty body is cooler…
The compositions of planet-forming disks are set by a combination of material inherited from the interstellar medium and material reprocessed during disk formation and evolution. Indeed, comets and primitive meteorites exhibit…
Recent detections of carbon-bearing molecules in the atmosphere of a candidate Hycean world, K2-18 b, with JWST are opening the prospects for characterising potential biospheres on temperate exoplanets. Hycean worlds are a recently…
We report results of long timescale adaptive kinetic Monte Carlo simulations aimed at identifying possible molecular reordering processes on both proton-disordered and ordered (Fletcher) basal plane (0001) surfaces of hexagonal ice. The…
In a uniform radio-frequency (RF) plasma between a large electrode pair, the addition of an axial magnetic field induces diverse longitudinal filaments. To reveal its pattern dynamics, we conduct two-dimensional (2D) Particle-In-Cell (PIC)…
Biomolecular condensates play a crucial role in the spatial organization of living matter. These membrane-less organelles, resulting from liquid-liquid phase separation, operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium, with their size and…
Collective guidance of out-of-equilibrium systems without using external fields is a challenge of paramount importance in active matter, ranging from bacterial colonies to swarms of self-propelled particles. Designing strategies to guide…
Molecules are ubiquitous in space. They are necessary component in the creation of habitable planetary systems and can provide the basic building blocks of life. Solid-state processes are pivotal in the formation of molecules in space and…