Related papers: Evolution of the Archean Atmosphere

Percolation has long served as a model for diverse phenomena and systems. The percolation transition, that is, the formation of a giant cluster on a macroscopic scale, is known as one of the most robust continuous transitions. Recently,…

Exoplanets with lower equilibrium temperatures than Earth and primordial hydrogen atmospheres that evaporate after formation should pass through transient periods where oceans can form on their surfaces, as liquid water can form below a few…

Many aspects of anthropogenic global change, such as land cover change, biodiversity loss and the intensification of agricultural production, threaten the natural biosphere. These aspects seem somewhat disjunct and specific so that it is…

A major focus of the planetary science and astrobiology community is the understanding of planetary habitability, including the myriad factors that control the evolution and sustainability of temperate surface environments such as that of…

Our understanding of the processes that are relevant to the formation and maintenance of habitable planetary systems is advancing at a rapid pace, both from observation and theory. The present review focuses on recent research that bears on…

Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…

Climate change is a massive multidimensional shift. Temperature shifts, in particular, have important implications for urbanization, agriculture, health, productivity, and poverty, among other things. While much research has documented…

Galaxy interactions expel a significant amount of stars and gas into the surrounding environment. I review the formation and evolution of the tidal debris spawned during these collisions, and describe how this evolution depends on the large…

Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of low-mass stars undergo strong tidal effects that modify their spin states. These planets are expected to host dense atmospheres that can also play an important role in the spin evolution. On one…

The earliest atmospheres of rocky planets originate from extensive volatile release during magma ocean epochs that occur during assembly of the planet. These establish the initial distribution of the major volatile elements between…

Brown dwarfs are massive, giant exoplanet analogues subject to variability and colour changes, known as the L/T transition, fundamental for their thermal evolution. The drivers of the L/T transition remain elusive, with atmospheric…

Migration between different habitats is ubiquitous among biological populations. In this Letter, we study a simple quasispecies model for evolution in two different habitats, with different fitness landscapes, coupled through one-way…

Mixed microbial communities, usually composed of various bacterial and fungal species, are fundamental in a plethora of environments, from soil to human gut and skin. Their evolution is a paradigmatic example of intertwined dynamics, where…

Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…

Evolution gave rise to creatures that are arguably more sophisticated than the greatest human-designed systems. This feat has inspired computer scientists since the advent of computing and led to optimization tools that can evolve complex…

The primary ingredient of Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis is the assumption that atmospheric carbon dioxide variations are the cause for temperature variations. In this paper we discuss this assumption and analyze it on basis of…

We analyse the evolution of cosmological perturbations which leads to the formation of large isolated voids in the Universe. We assume that initial perturbations are spherical and all components of the Universe (radiation, matter and dark…

This paper outlines astrophysical issues related to the long term fate of the universe. We consider the evolution of planets, stars, stellar populations, galaxies, and the universe itself over time scales which greatly exceed the current…

Convection is an important phenomenon in the atmospheres of A-type and cooler stars. A description of convection in ATLAS models is presented, together with details of how it is specified in model calculations. The effects of changing the…

The quasispecies theory is studied for dynamic replication landscapes. A meaningful asymptotic quasispecies is defined for periodic time dependencies. The quasispecies' composition is constantly changing over the oscillation period. The…