abiogenesis

The liver is an orchestra in which every cell plays its part from a shared score. Males and females have different scores: in males, the genes responsible for detoxifying foreign substances and steroid hormones sound louder, while in females, the genes for fat metabolism and bile acids do.

Life begins with a bubble. In a warm puddle on ancient Earth, fat molecules could gather into tiny spheres — prototypes of cells. Inside such a sphere, a polymer happened to be present that accelerated the uptake of new fats from the surrounding water. The bubble grew, divided, and passed its composition to offspring.

When an antibody meets a virus, it doesn't latch on with a single death grip. Rather, it's like two bunches of grapes tumbling in water, catching each other with dozens of short tendrils. Each tendril is weak on its own, easily torn by the thermal jitter of water molecules, but together they hold tight.

A jazz ensemble: at first, a cacophony of random notes. Then — a catchy riff that plays over and over. Such is the riddle of the origin of life — only in the language of chemistry.

In the black depths of space, on the surfaces of tiny icy dust grains, a quiet construction is underway. There, where temperatures drop to near absolute zero and harsh radiation abounds, the ordinary amino acid glycine, the simplest protein building block, links up with itself.

In 1970, mathematician John Conway invented the Game of Life — a cellular field where just three rules generate surprisingly complex patterns. Forty years later, SmoothLife appeared: a version where space is no longer cellular but smooth, like a blurred patch. The authors of the new study took an even simpler variant of this continuous game: now everything changes smoothly in time as well.

A desert where every step reshapes the terrain. Dunes settle, new slopes emerge, and the next step is dictated by what you've just trampled. That's roughly how "sandscapes" work — a mathematical model inspired by living systems.

The search for life beyond Earth is like tuning an old radio: we listen to the chemical whisper of distant exoplanets' atmospheres, trying to pick up signs of biological activity.

The Drake Equation is an attempt to guess the number of intelligent civilizations in our Galaxy. It’s like counting finished cakes in an unknown bakery: you know the ovens (stars), the baking sheets (planets), and the baking time. But were eggs added to the batter? Western science, relying on a single earthly recipe, considers them a rare ingredient.

Life is a constant dance between order and chaos. Back in the mid-20th century, Erwin Schrödinger noted that living things feed not so much on matter as on "negative entropy"—the ability to maintain their own order by increasing disorder around them.

A city is a living system: it consumes resources, produces waste, and its 'circulatory system'—the road network — delivers people and goods to their destinations. But while engineers design transport arteries as rigid geometry of straight lines, nature has spent millions of years perfecting ideal distribution networks.

In the first moments after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts. But today we see only matter — stars, planets, ourselves. Where did the antimatter go? One clue hides in nearly elusive particles: right-handed neutrinos. The usual story is that their decays create a slight bias in favor of matter.

A tightrope walker inches across a chasm. As long as they keep their balance and avoid sudden moves, they're safe. But one overcorrection, and a fall is inevitable. Life works much the same way at every level — from proteins inside a cell to entire ecosystems.

The idea of extraterrestrial origin of life has long excited minds. Fred Hoyle believed bacteria travel between stars. A new study tested a similar but closer route: from Mars to Earth. In ancient times, Mars had water, and asteroid impacts knocked rocks with microbes into space.

The search for extraterrestrial life is like a detective investigation: from tiny clues, you must distinguish traces of life from random imprints of non-living nature. On Saturn's moon Enceladus, the investigators are lucky — geysers burst from cracks in the icy crust, ejecting water from the subsurface ocean straight into space.

A crowd in a city square behaves differently depending on whether people hold hands. If each person only lightly touches a neighbor's elbow, people easily spread out in all directions — the crowd expands as a smooth carpet. But if they interlock fingers, movement slows down and the crowd breaks into clumps: dense clusters form here and there, with empty corridors between them.

A pot of water sits on the stove. The temperature drops: plus one degree, zero, minus one — the water stays liquid. But at some point, a light breath is enough to make the whole mass instantly freeze into ice. Physicists call such jumps first-order phase transitions.

Yeast are trapped in a clear gel, like raisins in jelly. They can't move on their own, but soon they start rising to the top. The secret lies in their own homemade fizz. During fermentation, yeast release carbon dioxide. In a thick medium, the gas doesn't escape but accumulates until bubbles form.

A rock knocked off one planet by an asteroid impact hurtles through space and lands on another. If microbial spores are hiding inside, they might survive the cold, the radiation, and the rough landing. That's panspermia — the idea that life travels between worlds. But imagining such a journey is one thing; calculating every step is quite another.

At the dawn of Earth, about four billion years ago, the planet was a harsh place: a dim sun, frequent asteroid impacts, and air without oxygen. Under such conditions, the first steps of life seem almost impossible.

In a thin film of water squeezed between two glass plates, bacteria live. Oxygen reaches them only through one wall, like air entering a room through a single window. When bacteria are few, they pay no attention to this: some stick to one wall, some to the other, and the picture is symmetric. But once they multiply, everything changes.

Previously, generative models for drug discovery worked like an artist painting without choosing a canvas. They learned from existing molecules and simply produced similar ones, without considering how the space of possible compounds is organized. SpaceGFN changes the approach: now chemical space is a construction set where the user specifies the parts and the assembly rules.

As an embryo grows, its cells don't just divide: they constantly touch their neighbors, like people in a crowded bus. The strength of these contacts determines where a cell moves and what shape the tissue takes. Scientists studied how cell 'stickiness' changes during the earliest stages of development.

Cometary ice slams into the young Earth. The pressure at the impact point is like stacking six aircraft carriers on your thumbnail. In the lab, such conditions are reproduced by squeezing a tiny sample between two rotating anvils. This time, adenosine monophosphate — one of the letters of future RNA — was placed under the anvils.

Dissolve a few salts and formaldehyde in a glass of water. After a while, the liquid spontaneously separates: droplets with membranes appear, like tiny bubbles. Inside each droplet, chemical transformations occur, and the droplet itself grows, absorbing material from the surrounding solution. These droplets are not just bubbles.

A bacterium in a drop of water doesn't just swim: it probes the space around it, decides where to turn, and finds its way out of a tangled maze. Artificial microscopic swimmers haven't been able to do that until now: they had to be led by the hand, with signals sent from outside.

Life began with molecules akin to natural sunscreen — based on carbon, they soaked up the mild ultraviolet of the young Sun and turned it into heat. This way of dissipating energy wasn’t just heating: it made molecules self-organize, like chefs kneading structured dough out of a chaos of ingredients. But ultraviolet is a finicky tool.

Living cells continuously exchange light signals — a billion times fainter than daylight. It's like a whisper picked up by ultra-sensitive instruments. A healthy cell whispers rhythmically, a cancerous one — haltingly, but with a long memory of previous flashes.