Related papers: Panspermia Revisited
Hypothetical existence of other universes gives an opportunity not only to extend the scope of physics, but the scope of biology, SETI, and METI as well. Some steps of the development of alien life concept shall be briefly summarized, then…
Matter on large scales in the Universe is distributed in form of sheets, filaments and spherical halos. Most of the known matter in the Universe is in a diffuse plasma state - in halos around galaxies and clusters of galaxies, and in the…
Sex is considered as an evolutionary paradox, since its evolutionary advantage does not necessarily overcome the two fold cost of sharing half of one's offspring's genome with another member of the population. Here we demonstrate that…
Phages are one of the most present groups of organisms in the biosphere. Their identification continues and their taxonomies are divergent. However, due to their evolution mode and the complexity of their species ecosystem, their…
The origin of life on Earth via the spontaneous emergence of a protocell prior to Darwinian evolution remains a fundamental open question in physics and chemistry. Here, we develop a conceptual framework based on information theory and…
Selective sweeps affect neutral genetic diversity through hitchhiking. While this effect is limited to the local genomic region of the sweep in panmictic populations, we find that in spatially-extended populations the combined effects of…
Living organisms survive and multiply even though they have uncertain and incomplete information about their environment and imperfect models to predict the consequences of their actions. Bayesian models have been proposed to face this…
In this note we will consider the question when from the appropriate behavior of a sequence of points on caps we can conclude that the sequence is uniformly distributed on the sphere.
Context. Astrobiological evolution of the Milky Way (or the shape of its "astrobiological landscape") has emerged as one of the key research topics in recent years. In order to build precise, quantitative models of the Galactic…
Results from molecular dynamics simulations of simple, structured particles capable of self-assembling into polyhedral shells are described. The analysis focuses on the growth histories of individual shells in the presence of an explicit…
Recent direct measurements of Galactic cosmic ray spectra by balloon/space-borne detectors reveal spectral hardenings of all major nucleus species at rigidities of a few hundred GV. The all-sky diffuse gamma-ray emissions measured by the…
Galaxies represent the visible fabric of the Universe and there has been considerable progress recently in both observational and theoretical studies. The underlying goal is to understand the present-day diversity of galaxy forms, masses…
Why sex evolved and it prevails in nature remains one of the great puzzles of evolution. Most biologists would explain that it promotes genetic variability, however this explanation suffers from several difficulties. What advantages might…
Chemical abundance data for the Galaxy show a wide dispersion. We try to check if this dispersion may also be found with chemical evolution models as an effect of variations of an Initial Mass Function (IMF) which follows a Poisson's…
This study examines the communication of astrobiology and the Search for Life Elsewhere (SLE) in academic papers, press releases, and news articles over three decades. Through a quantitative content analysis, it investigates the prevalence…
Sex in higher diploids carries a two-fold cost of males that should reduce its fitness relative to cloning and result in its extinction. Instead, sex is widespread and it is clonal species that face early obsolescence. One possible reason…
In view of their nature, planetary nebulae have very short lifetimes, and the chemical abundances derived so far have a natural bias favoring younger objects. In this work, we report physical parameters and abundances for a sample of old…
Interstellar dust is spread in galaxies over large scales, often far beyond the stellar disks. Several mechanisms can be responsible for carrying the dust both in the vertical and radial directions, producing in general different spatial…
The distributed genome hypothesis states that the set of genes in a population of bacteria is distributed over all individuals that belong to the specific taxon. It implies that certain genes can be gained and lost from generation to…
This paper explains why planets in binary star systems might have a lower frequency. A transient triple state of the binary causes the dispersal of planets.