相关论文: Life and Water

The origin of land plants was one of the most important events in evolutionary history of earth in terms of its broad impact on metazoan life and the biotic environment. Because vascular tissues enabled land plants to meet the challenges of…

Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…

Water, a subject of human fascination for millennia, is likely the most studied substance on Earth, with an entire scientific field -- hydrodynamics -- dedicated to understanding water in motion. However, when water flows through…

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…

Inspired by dense contractile tissues, where cells are subject to periodic deformation, we formulate and study a generic hydrodynamic theory of pulsating active liquids. Combining mechanical and phenomenological arguments, we postulate that…

Liquids flow, making them remarkably distinct from solids and close to gases. At the same time, interactions in liquids are strong as in solids. The combination of these two properties is believed to be the ultimate obstacle to constructing…

Normally the role of phase fluctuations in superfluids and superconductors is to drive a phase transition to the normal state. This happens due to proliferation of topologically nontrivial phase fluctuations in the form of vortices. Here we…

The phenomenon of life is discussed within a framework of its origin as defined by four hypotheses. The 1. hypothesis says: Life, as we know, is (H-C-N-O) based and relies on the number of bulk (Na-Mg-P-S-Cl-K-Ca) and trace elements…

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…

Entropy increase is fundamentally related to the breaking of time-reversal symmetry. By adding the 'extra dimension' associated with thermodynamic forces, we extend that discrete symmetry to a continuous symmetry for the dynamical…

The topological theory of phase transitions was proposed on the basis of different arguments, the most important of which are: a direct evidence of the relation between topology and phase transitions for some exactly solvable models; an…

A liquid drop impacting a dry solid surface with sufficient kinetic energy will splash, breaking apart into numerous secondary droplets. This phenomenon shows many similarities to forced wetting, including the entrainment of air at the…

Active matter is not only indispensable to our understanding of diverse biological processes, but also provides a fertile ground for discovering novel physics. Many emergent properties impossible for equilibrium systems have been…

We present a theory for self-driven fluids, such as motorized cytoskeletal extracts or bacterial suspensions, that takes into account the underlying periodic duty cycle carried by the active particles of which the system is composed. We…

Life can be viewed as a localized chemical system that sits on, or in the basin of attraction of, a metastable dynamical attractor state that remains out of equilibrium with the environment. Such a view of life allows that new living states…

Through in-depth thinking and reasoning about the conditions required for cells to maintain unchanged material distribution, it is concluded that life metabolic reactions require high information content. However, the self-replication of a…

Skeptics of biological evolution often claim that evolution requires a decrease in entropy, giving rise to a conflict with the second law of thermodynamics. This argument is fallacious because it neglects the large increase in entropy…

Should we expect most habitable planets to share the Earth's marbled appearance? For a planetary surface to boast extensive areas of both land and water, a delicate balance must be struck between the volume of water it retains and the…

Water and land surfaces on a planet interact with gases in the atmosphere and with radiation from the star. These interactions define the environments that prevail on the planet, some of which may be more amenable to prebiotic chemistry,…

There are two dominant and contrasting classes of origin of life scenarios: those predicting that life emerged in submarine hydrothermal systems, where chemical disequilibrium can provide an energy source for nascent life; and those…