Related papers: The Abiogenesis Timescale
In this paper authors present a general methodology for age dependent reliability analysis of degrading or ageing systems, structures and components.The methodology is based on Bayesian methods and inference, its ability to incorporate…
Apparent biodiversity on earth exists only if we compare different species separated from their environments. Meanwhile coexisting species have to be identical in terms of energetic interactions. Consider the biosphere as a network of…
Exoplanet research is carried out at the limits of the capabilities of current telescopes and instruments. The studied signals are weak, and often embedded in complex systematics from instrumental, telluric, and astrophysical sources.…
We present a new framework to characterize the occurrence rates of planet candidates identified by Kepler based on hierarchical Bayesian modeling, Approximate Bayesian Computing (ABC), and sequential importance sampling. For this study we…
Branching processes are classical growth models in cell kinetics. In their construction, it is usually assumed that cell lifetimes are independent random variables, which has been proved false in experiments. Models of dependent lifetimes…
We investigate the dependence of elemental abundances on physical constants, and the implications this has for the distribution of complex life for various proposed habitability criteria. We consider three main sources of abundance…
In this work we develop a microscopic physical model of early evolution, where phenotype,organism life expectancy, is directly related to genotype, the stability of its proteins in their native conformations which can be determined exactly…
The presence of short-lived ($\sim$\,Myr) radioactive isotopes in meteoritic inclusions at the time of their formation represents a unique opportunity to study the circumstances that led to the formation of the Solar System. To interpret…
We extend the "gauge choice" problem Lamb noticed to include a time-dependent relativistic non-perturbative Coulomb field, which can be produced by a cluster of relativistic charged particles. If adiabatic conditions are carefully…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
The Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis considers that greenhouse gas concentrations should have declined during the Holocene in absence of humankind activity, leading to glacial inception around the present. It partly relies on the fact that…
One of the major goals for astronomy in the next decades is the remote search for biosignatures (i.e.\ the spectroscopic evidence of biological activity) in exoplanets. Here, we adopt a Bayesian statistical framework to discuss the…
A prevailing viewpoint in palaeoclimate science is that a single palaeoclimate record contains insufficient information to discriminate between most competing explanatory models. Results we present here suggest the contrary. Using SMC^2…
The choice of the summary statistics used in Bayesian inference and in particular in ABC algorithms has bearings on the validation of the resulting inference. Those statistics are nonetheless customarily used in ABC algorithms without…
This thesis assesses the influence of astronomical phenomena on the Earth's biosphere and climate. I examine in particular the relevance of both the path of the Sun through the Galaxy and the evolution of the Earth's orbital parameters in…
Protein aggregation is of particular interest due to its connection with many diseases and disorders. Many factors can alter the dynamics and result of this process, one of them being the diffusivity of the monomers and aggregates in the…
Survival probability within a certain time horizon T is a common measure of population viability. The choice of T implicitly involves a time preference, similar to economic discounting: Conservation success is evaluated at the time horizon…
The extent of parallel evolution at the genotypic level is quantitatively linked to the distribution of beneficial fitness effects (DBFE) of mutations. The standard view, based on light-tailed distributions (i.e. distributions with finite…
Although the overall time-scale for nuclear fission is long, suggesting a slow process, rapid shape evolution occurs in its later stages near scission. Theoretical prediction of the fission fragments and their characteristics are often…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…