Related papers: Life and Water
We show that terrestrial planets in the habitable zones of M dwarfs older than $\sim$ 1 Gyr could have been in runaway greenhouses for several hundred Myr following their formation due to the star's extended pre-main sequence phase,…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
Planetary obliquity is a first order control on planetary climate and seasonal contrast, which has a number of cascading consequences for life. How moderately high obliquity (obliquities greater than Earth's current obliquity up to…
Water offers a large temperature domain of stable liquid, and the characteristic hydrophobic effects are first a consequence of the temperature insensitivity of equation-of-state features of the aqueous medium, compared to other liquids. On…
Wetting transitions have been predicted and observed to occur for various combinations of fluids and surfaces. This paper describes the origin of such transitions, for liquid films on solid surfaces, in terms of the gas-surface interaction…
An example of capillary phenomena commonly seen and often studied is a droplet of water hanging in air from a horizontal surface. A thin capillary surface interface between the liquid and gas develops tangential surface tension, which…
Non-transiting terrestrial planets will be accessible by upcoming observatories of which LIFE is an example. Planet b orbiting Teegarden's Star is one of the optimal targets for such missions. We use a one-dimensional atmospheric model with…
Biological cells and many living organisms are mostly made of liquids and therefore, by analogy with liquid drops, they should exhibit a range of fundamental nonlinear phenomena such as the onset of standing surface waves. Here, we test…
Fluctuation theorems, which have been developed over the past 15 years, have resulted in fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of how irreversibility emerges from reversible dynamics, and have provided new statistical mechanical…
The search for what differentiates inanimate matter from living things began in antiquity as a search for a "fundamental life force" embedded deep within living things - a special material unit owned only by life - later transforming to…
The Hadean, once thought to be uninhabitable and tumultuous, has more recently been recontextualized as a clement time in which oceans, land, and life likely appeared on Earth. This non-exhaustive chapter follows multiple threads from…
In a recent letter [1], Zaitsev et al. report observations of evaporating water micro-droplets over a heated solid substrate and suggest a model for the mechanisms of both droplet levitation and inter-droplet interaction. According to their…
The ever-expanding catalog of detected super-Earths calls for theoretical studies of their properties in the case of a substantial water layer. This work considers such water planets with a range of masses and water mass fractions (2 to 5…
Traditionally, the difference in binding energy from the experimental value with respect to the theoretical liquid-drop model value, has been seen as indication of independent-particle character along with magicity for particular number of…
Water is fundamental to our understanding of the evolution of planetary systems and the delivery of volatiles to the surfaces of potentially habitable planets. Yet, we currently have essentially no facilities capable of observing this key…
A great number of biological organisms live in aqueous environments. Major evolutionary transitions, including the emergence of life itself, likely occurred in such environments. While the chemical aspects of the role of water in biology…
Dynamics is central to living systems. In the last two decades, experiments have revealed that the dynamics in diverse biological systems - from intracellular cytoplasm to cellular and organismal aggregates - are remarkably similar to that…
Water near hydrophobic surfaces is like that at a liquid-vapor interface, where fluctuations in water density are substantially enhanced compared to that in bulk water. Here we use molecular simulations with specialized sampling techniques…
Relations between the thermodynamics and dynamics of supercooled liquids approaching a glass transition have been proposed over many years. The potential energy surface of model liquids has been increasingly studied since it provides a…
Habitability is a measure of an environment's potential to support life, and a habitable exoplanet supports liquid water on its surface. However, a planet's success in maintaining liquid water on its surface is the end result of a complex…