相关论文: Life and Water
Water is commonly associated to the existence of life. However, there is no clear reason why water should be the only liquid in which life could form and survive. Since the seminal work of L. J. Henderson in 1913, scientists are trying to…
It is undeniable that life as we know it depends on liquid water. It is difficult to imagine any biochemical machinery that does not require water. On Earth, life adapts to the most diverse environments and, once established, it is very…
Darwinian Theory depicts life as being overwhelmingly consumed by a fight for survival in a hostile environment. However, from a thermodynamic perspective, life is a dynamic, out of equilibrium process, stabilizing and coevolving in concert…
Water is vital for life, and without it biomolecules and cells cannot maintain their structures and functions. The remarkable properties of water originate from its ability to form hydrogen-bonding networks and dynamics, which the…
Understanding the thermodynamic function of life may shed light on its origin. Life, as are all irreversible processes, is contingent on entropy production. Entropy production is a measure of the rate of the tendency of Nature to explore…
Terrestrial exoplanets in the canonical habitable zone may have a variety of initial water fractions due to random volatile delivery by planetesimals. If the total planetary water complement is high, the entire surface may be covered in…
One of the unique features associated with the Earth is that the fraction of its surface covered by land is comparable to that spanned by its oceans and other water bodies. Here, we investigate how extraterrestrial biospheres depend on the…
Earth's modern climate is characterized by wet, rainy deep tropics, however paleoclimate and planetary science have revealed a wide range of hydrological cycle regimes connected to different external parameters. Here we investigate how…
From microscopic fungi to colossal whales, fluidic ejections are a universal and intricate phenomenon in biology, serving vital functions such as animal excretion, venom spraying, prey hunting, spore dispersal, and plant guttation. This…
Nature's many complex systems--physical, biological, and cultural--are islands of low-entropy order within increasingly disordered seas of surrounding, high-entropy chaos. Energy is a principal facilitator of the rising complexity of all…
In the present work the Stochastic generalization of the quantum hydrodynamic analogy (SQHA) is used to obtain the far from equilibrium kinetics for a real gas and its fluid phase. In gasses and their liquids, interacting by Lennard-Jones…
Phase transitions, such as the freezing of water and the magnetisation of a ferromagnet upon lowering the ambient temperature, are familiar physical phenomena. Interestingly, such a collective change of behaviour at a phase transition is…
Entropy decreases on the Earth due to day/night temperature differences. This decrease exceeds the decrease in entropy on the Earth related to evolution by many orders of magnitude. Claims by creationists that science is somehow…
In a recent paper [1] Lineweaver and Davis performed a statistical analysis to claim that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth indicates high probability of biogenesis on terrestrial- type planets. We argue that the rapid appearance of life…
The question "What is life?" has been asked and studied by the researchers of various fields. Nevertheless, no global theory which unified various aspects of life has been proposed so far. Considering that the physical principle for the…
It is not currently possible to create a living organism ab initio due to the overwhelming complexity of biological systems. In fact, the origin of life mechanism, this being how biological organisms form from non-living matter, is unknown.…
Many mechanisms, functions and structures of life have been unraveled. However, the fundamental driving force that propelled chemical evolution and led to life has remained obscure. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, written as an equation of…
Modern developments in nonequilibrium thermodynamics have significant implications for the origins of life. The reasons for this are closely related to a generalized version of the second law of thermodynamics recently found for entropy…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…
It is sometimes assumed that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. Here we critically examine the assumptions inherent in this if-life-evolved-rapidly-life-must-be-common argument. We use the…