It's life, but just as we know it

It's life, but just as we know it.

Life, but not as we know it

species of chameleon, Furcifer labordi, in Madagascar that spends most of its life as an egg. in Madagascar and the American Museum of Natural History in New York, have found a chameleon with a remarkable lifestyle and report the results in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (published online). Although there are almost limitless theoretical combinations of ...

Life, but not as we know it.

Living systems are perhaps the most fascinating examples of chemistry in action. Molecules assemble into biomachinery that can carry out complex tasks, making life possible. But how did it all begin? This question can be tackled from a geological perspective by surveying the possible conditions under which key biomolecules might have emerged on early Earth. Alternatively, a systems-biology appr...

Life as we know it

This paper presents a heuristic proof (and simulations of a primordial soup) suggesting that life-or biological self-organization-is an inevitable and emergent property of any (ergodic) random dynamical system that possesses a Markov blanket. This conclusion is based on the following arguments: if the coupling among an ensemble of dynamical systems is mediated by short-range forces, then the st...

A conference panel: but not as we know it!

This panel will take the form of a public debate about whether the conference of which it forms part has a future. Academic conferences are increasingly hard to cost-justify and growing awareness of the environmental impact adds to the negative aspects – especially when the HCI community have developed so many tools and techniques to afford virtual collaboration, dissemination and critique. Yet...