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Fast growing scientific topics have famously been key harbingers of the new frontiers of science, yet, large-scale analyses of their genesis and impact are rare. We investigate one possible factor connected with a topic's extraordinary…
The key goals of the astrobiology community are to identify environments beyond Earth that may be habitable, and to search for signs of life in those environments. A fundamental aspect of understanding the limits of habitable environments…
Academic challenges comprise effective means for (i) advancing the state of the art, (ii) putting in the spotlight of a scientific community specific topics and problems, as well as (iii) closing the gap for under represented communities in…
Causality and causal inference have emerged as core research areas at the interface of modern statistics and domains including biomedical sciences, social sciences, computer science, and beyond. The field's inherently interdisciplinary…
The outer solar system has a diverse range of objects, holding important clues about the formation and evolution of our solar system, the emergence and current distribution of life, and the physical processes controlling both our own and…
The aim of this essay is to analyze the role of quantum mechanics as an inherent characteristic of life. During the last ten years the problem of the origin of life has become an innovative research subject approached by many authors. The…
The vision of 2030STEM is to address systemic barriers in institutional structures and funding mechanisms required to achieve full inclusion in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and accelerate leadership pathways for…
In the same way as the Hilbert Program was a response to the foundational crisis of mathematics, this article tries to formulate a research program for the socio-economic sciences. The aim of this contribution is to stimulate research in…
Any search for present or past life beyond Earth should consider the initial processes and related environmental controls that might have led to its start. As on Earth, such an understanding lies well beyond how simple organic molecules…
The rich experiences of an intentional, goal-oriented life emerge, in an unpredictable fashion, from the basic laws of physics. Here I argue that this unpredictability is no mirage: there are true gaps between life and non-life, mind and…
A major gap exists between the conceptual suggestion of how much a nation should invest in science, innovation, and technology, and the practical implementation of what is done. We identify 4 critical challenges that must be address in…
One of the most exciting scientific challenges is to detect Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of other stars in the galaxy and search for evidence of life. The ability to observe and characterise dozens of potentially Earth-like…
NASA should design missions to Mars for the purpose of generating "Aha!" discoveries to jolt scientists contemplating the molecular origins of life. These missions should be designed with an understanding of the privileged chemistry that…
The development and deployment of interstellar missions will without doubt require orders of magnitude more resources than needed for current or past megaprojects (Apollo, Iter, LHC,...). Question is how enough resources for such…
The past three decades have seen prodigious advances in astronomy and astrophysics. Beginning with the exploration of our solar system and continuing through the pioneering Explorers and Great Observatories of today, NASA missions have made…
Emergence is a phenomenon taken for granted in science but also still not well understood. We have developed a model of artificial genetic evolution intended to allow for emergence on genetic, population and social levels. We present the…
This white paper provides a comprehensive review of our present understanding of experimental neutrino anomalies that remain unresolved, charting the progress achieved over the last decade at the experimental and phenomenological level, and…
The discovery of inhabited exoplanets hinges on identifying biosignature gases. JWST can reveal biosignature gases, though current discoveries have yet to evidence life. The central challenge is attribution: how can we confidently identify…
The crisis in the reproducibility of experiments invites a re-evaluation of methods of inquiry and validation procedures. The text challenges current assumptions of knowledge acquisition and introduces G-complexity for defining decidable…
The ultimate goal of astrobiology is to determine the distribution and diversity of life in the universe. But as the word "biosignature" suggests, what will be detected is not life itself, but an observation implicating a particular process…