相关论文: 'Genesis': A takeover from field-responsive matter…
The emergence of life from inanimate matter presents a thermodynamic challenge: the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates a global trend towards disorder, yet life constitutes localized pockets of profound organization. This paper presents…
An origin of Earth life on Mars would resolve significant inconsistencies between the inferred history of life and Earth's geologic history. Life as we know it utilizes amino acids, nucleic acids, and lipids for the metabolic,…
A plethora of computational models have been developed in recent decades to account for the morphogenesis of complex biological fluid networks, such as capillary beds. Contemporary adaptation models are based on optimization schemes where…
Life on earth is distinguished by long-lived correlations in time. The patterns of material organization that characterize living organisms today are contingent on events that occurred billions of years ago. This contingency is a necessary…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
Life has a special status, it even has its own science: biology. In many ways, the logic of life seems to differ from that of atoms, molecules, planets, or any other `inanimate object'. However, life is increasingly measured using…
By generalizing a class of models recently introduced to account for protracted transients in biological systems, we identify a novel mechanism for hyperuniformity. In this model, competition of particles over a shared resource guides the…
The origin of life is often approached through the lens of replication, heredity, or molecular specificity. This paper proposes a thermodynamic framework in which the emergence of life is driven by the persistence of reaction pathways that…
We cast the metabolism of interacting cells within a statistical mechanics framework considering both, the actual phenotypic capacities of each cell and its interaction with its neighbors. Reaction fluxes will be the components of…
Biological systems reach organizational complexity that far exceeds the complexity of any known inanimate objects. Biological entities undoubtedly obey the laws of quantum physics and statistical mechanics. However, is modern physics…
Virtually all cells use energy and ion-specific membrane pumps to maintain large transmembrane gradients of Na$^+$, K$^+$, Cl$^-$, Mg$^{++}$, and Ca$^{++}$. Although they consume up to 1/3 of a cell's energy budget, the corresponding…
The search for extraterrestrial life hinges on identifying biosignatures, often focusing on gaseous metabolic byproducts as indicators. However, most such biosignatures require assuming specific metabolic processes. It is widely recognized…
Recent research has extended methods from the fields of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics into other disciplines. Most notably, one recent work creates a unified theoretical framework to understand evolutionary biology, machine…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
The theory of interaction-based evolution argues that, at the most basic level of analysis, there is a third alternative for how adaptive evolution works besides a) accidental mutation and natural selection and b) Lamarckism, namely, c)…
We review the abundance and diversity of terrestrial rock hosted life, the environments it inhabits, the evolution of its metabolisms, and its fossil biomarkers to provide guidance in the search for the biomarkers of rock hosted life on…
The emergence of self-replication and information transmission in life's origin remains unexplained despite extensive research on the topic. A hypothesis explaining the transition from a simple organic world to a complex RNA world is…
A field theory is proposed where the regular fermionic matter and the dark fermionic matter can be different states of the same "primordial" fermion fields. In regime of the fermion densities typical for normal particle physics, the…
We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organisation, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: (a) living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by…
Geological materials are often seen as the antithesis of soft; rocks are hard. However, during the formation of minerals and rocks, all the systems we shall discuss, indeed geological materials in general, pass through a stage where they…