相关论文: A molecular perspective on the limits of life: Enz…

One of the important challenges facing high resolution molecular dynamics calculations is to reproduce biological functions that occur in the macroscopic world and involve macroscopic variables. Some of these functions can be well described…

Enzymes are on the front lines of evolution. All living organisms rely on highly efficient, specific enzymes for growth, sustenance, and reproduction; and many diseases are a consequence of a mutation on an enzyme that affects its catalytic…

There are many exotic thermodynamic processes that are hard to study in nature. Here, we synthesize a structured environment to explore the extremes of thermodynamics. We present an engine running at extreme temperatures of above ten…

Motility is a ubiquitous feature of microbial life on Earth, and is widely regarded as a promising biosignature candidate. In the search for motile organisms, it is therefore valuable to have rough estimates for the number of such microbes…

The search for biosignatures necessitates developing our understanding of life under different conditions. If life can influence the climate evolution of its planet then understanding the behaviour of life-climate feedbacks under extreme…

The importance of molecular-scale forces in sculpting biological form and function has been acknowledged for more than a century. Accounting for forces in biology is a problem that lies at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics,…

The biomolecules in and around a living cell -- proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, carbohydrates -- continuously sample myriad conformational states that are thermally accessible at physiological temperatures. Simultaneously, a given…

Living systems maintain or increase local order by working against the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Thermodynamic consistency is restored as they dissipate heat, thereby increasing the net entropy of their environment. Recently introduced…

Microplasmas are operated around atmospheric pressure exhibiting pronounced non-equilibrium characteristics, i.e. they possess energetic electrons while ions and neutrals remain cold. They have gained significant interest due to their…

For more than 3.5 billion years, life experienced dramatic environmental extremes on Earth. These include shifts from oxygen-less to over-oxygenated atmospheres and cycling between hothouse conditions and global glaciations. Meanwhile, an…

Some microbes appear to be able to metabolize in glacial ice or permafrost. The rate depends on temperature, nutrient level, and bioelement availability, among other factors. I have developed a plausible argument that they do this while…

The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…

Trying to identify the entropy production within a cell has been part of debates and studies in the last century. First the idea was to make a resemblance of a cell with a Carnot engine, which is the most thermodynamically perfect machine.…

Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…

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 -…

The living organism is considered as an open system, whereas Prigogine's approach to the thermodynamics of such systems is used. The approach allows one to formulate the law of individual growth and development (ontogenesis) of the living…

In interiors of celestial objects matter is subdued to extremely high values of pressure.Theoretical analysis of the behaviour of atoms and molecules under high pressure is a complex quantum mechanical and statistical problem. The aim of…

Solutes added to solutions often dramatically impact molecular processes ranging from the suspension or precipitation of colloids to biomolecular associations and protein folding. Here we revisit the origins of the effective attractive…

The incredible thermo-mechanical properties of biological materials arise from the microscopic scale due to a complex hierarchical mechanism, regulated by microinstabilities at the molecular level. The description of such complex structures…

We study the statistical underpinnings of life. We question some common assumptions about the thermodynamics of life and illustrate how, contrary to widespread belief, even in a closed system entropy growth can accompany an increase in…