Life from geometry

One of the things always fascinated me about Escher’s work is his representation of infinity. Infinity plays a big role in many things I do such as in cosmology, and here [Development II] we have a picture in which he has a pattern of hexagons which recedes, or gets small and smaller, until infinity is represented by the infinite crowing at the central point. There’s another feature here where you have this very geometrical structure in the middle...and as you work you way out in the picture out these hexagons become living creatures. Something Escher was always playing with — this life coming out of inanimate geometry if you like.

Roger Penrose The Art of The Impossible: M C Escher and Me

Thanks to LC

Space soufflé

Outer space...is a vast slow cooker. The densest interstellar gas may contain 10,000 hydrogen atoms in a cubic centimeter, and three or four carbon atoms. This is a thousand trillionth of the density of the air we breathe. An atom in deep space may travel 100,000 kilometers before bumping into a partner. 

But... a long underappreciated bevy of three protons and two electrons called protonated molecular hydrogen, or H3+, catalyzes a great network of reactions as elements collide, or stick to the surface of star-produced microscopic silicate and carbon dust grains. Over many millions of years, compounds as complex as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are manufactured, with dozens of carbon atoms in arrays of benzene rings. Other structures are precursors to amino acids...

Goodbye Copernicus, Hello Universe by Caleb Scharf.

See also Deep Space, Branching Molecules, and Life’s Origins?


Image: Ben McCall

A million bombs all the time

The glory of the sun is violent and uninflected; its features are all flames and its sounds are all explosions. The Sun is so loud, like a million bombs all the time, that fine-spun sounds cannot be heard, like birds wading or figs tumbling or the muttering of mathematicians.

Things That Are by Amy Leach (2012)

But the energy density of life is greater by a factor of 10,000.

Image from Mundus subterraneus by Athanasius Kircher (1665)

An unceasing flux

You share some of your genes with the tree through the window, but you and that tree parted company very early in eukaryotic evolution, 1.5 billion years ago, each following a different course permitted by different genes, the product of mutations, recombination and natural selection. You run around, and I hope still climb trees occasionally; they bend gently in the breeze and convert the air into more trees, the magic trick to end them all. All those differences are written in the genes, genes that derive from your common ancestor but have now mostly diverged beyond recognition... 

But that tree has mitochondria too, which work in much the same way as its chloroplasts, endlessly transferring electrons down its trillions upon trillions of respiratory chains, pumping protons across membranes as they always did. As you always did. These same shuttling electrons and protons have sustained you from the womb: you pump 10²¹  protons per second, every second, without pause.

from The Vital Question by Nick Lane (2015)

Image: Magus6 via wikicommons

An infinite storm

The force that drives life at the smallest scale is not a mysterious, supernatural force, but it is a surprising one nevertheless. The force that drives life is chaos. 

At room temperature, air molecules reach speeds in excess of the fastest jet aeroplane. If we were reduced to the size of molecule, we would be bombarded by a molecular storm so fierce it would make a hurricane look like a breeze. 

To make the molecular storm a useful force for life...it is tamed by molecular machines.

— from Life's Ratchet by Peter M. Hoffman (2012)

Image: The Giantess by Leonora Carrington (1947) via Apollo Magazine.

The phrase 'an infinite storm' is from Travels in Alaska by John Muir (1910).

"She tosses her creatures out of nothingness..."

Research into the origin of life benefits from thinking about whole planets, says Andy Knoll:

Planetary history is the context for thinking about the history of life on a planet. When we explore Mars, it's our experience on Earth that informs that exploration. When Dimitar Sasselov, Dave Charbonneau and Dave Latham give us a sense of planetary atmospheres from Kepler, it will be our understanding of relationships between life and environment that will inform our interpretation of those atmospheres. It's hard for me to imagine efforts to understand either the origin of life on this planet or the distribution of life through the universe that don't revolve around the nature of planets.

as well as specific conditions on those planets:

Life was probably born in a small pond or lake, Jack Szostak believes...Rain-fed pools provide a fresh water environment, compatible with the delicate cell membranes formed from simple fatty acids, which would be destroyed instantly in the salty oceans. Some such pond was the place where crucial elements were mixed, heated and cooled in the right sequence to become life. Inanimate molecules, congregated together inside a fatty skin, somehow became capable of replication, and of evolution: the definition of life, as Szostak sees it. 

Very likely, Szostak says, life began near a hydrothermal vent: an underwater spout of hot water, flowing into the cold water of an icy lake, much like modern Yellowstone Lake in winter. This, he believes, was the oven and freezer where the ingredients of life were cooked, cooled, thawed in the order required for nucleic acids to go through cycles of replication, and for fatty acid membranes to allow nutrients to enter into the cell.

The quote at the top of the post is from one of Goethe's aphorisms on nature as cited by T. H. Huxley.

Image: Baobab trees on a mushroom island in Bay of Moramba, Madagascar, by Sebastião Salgado

You are a strange loop

Genes are...essential to self-organisation at all the scales of life – just not in a deterministic way. Rather, the genes are needed to make the machines that mediate feedback-driven self-organisation: the self-organisation is a high-level property that emerges from the underlying network, not a feature of any of the individual components.

from The Closed Loop by Jamie A. Davis

Image: Henri Cartier-Bresson

an Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world

A murmuration of starlings appears to mirror a quantum phenomenon:

[a] new model is mathematically identical to the equations that describe superfluid helium. When helium is cooled close to absolute zero, it becomes a liquid with no viscosity at all, as dictated by the laws of quantum physics.

Image: murmuration at Netivot via TheFabWeb.com

Ribosome

The ribosome is a tiny organelle present in all living cells in thousands of copies that manufactures the protein molecules on which all life is based. It effectively operates as a highly organized and intricate miniature factory, churning out those proteins – long chain-like molecules – by stitching together a hundred or more amino acid molecules in just the right order, and all within a few seconds. And this exquisitely efficient entity is contained within a complex chemical structure that is some 20-30 nanometres in diameter – just 2-3 millionths of a centimetre.

-- from What is Life? by Addy Pross

Added 27 October 2014: Listen to this section of Radiolab's translation show.

Added 26 Jan 2015: "We are all just different kinds of homes to the ribosomes!"


Image: David S. Goodsell, the Scripps Research Institute via RSBC Protein Data Bank