In the Life of a Bulldog Ant

Bulldog ants are well known in Australia for their aggressive behaviour and powerful stings. The ant Myrmecia pyriformis has also been listed as the worlds most dangerous ant by Guinness World Records. The venom of these ants has the potential to induce anaphylactic shock in allergic sting victims. As with most severe allergic reactions, the reaction may be lethal if left untreated. These large, alert ants have characteristic large eyes and long, slender mandibles. Some bull ants, such as Myrmecia pyriformis and Myrmecia pilosula are known to have caused several deaths in humans.

They have superior vision, able to track and even follow intruders from a distance of 1 m. Myrmecia is one of several ant genera which possess gamergates, female worker ants which are able to mate and reproduce, thus sustaining the colony after the loss of the queen. A colony of Myrmecia pyriformis without queen was collected in 1998 and kept in captivity, during which time the gamergates produced viable workers for three years.

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Bulldog Ant Scientific classification

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Subphylum: Hexapoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Hymenoptera
Superfamily: Vespoidea
Family: Formicidae
Subfamily: Myrmeciinae
Genus: Myrmecia

location

Bulldog ants are found in forests, woodlands, and heath. They make their homes underground which have expansive tunnel system with a small entrance.

Biology of the Bulldog Ant

These ants are well known in Australia for their aggressive behaviour and powerful stings. The venom of these ants has the potential to induce anaphylactic shock in allergic sting victims. As with most severe allergic reactions, the reaction may be lethal if left untreated. These large, alert ants have characteristic large eyes and long, slender mandibles. Some bull ants, such as Myrmecia pyriformis and Myrmecia pilosula are known to have caused several deaths in humans.

They have superior vision, able to track and even follow intruders from a distance of 1 m. Myrmecia is one of several ant genera which possess gamergates, female worker ants which are able to mate and reproduce, thus sustaining the colony after the loss of the queen. A colony of Myrmecia pyriformis without queen was collected in 1998 and kept in captivity, during which time the gamergates produced viable workers for three years.

What do Bulldog Ants Eat?

Bull ants eat small insects, honeydew (a sweet, sticky liquid found on leaves, deposited from various insects), seeds, fruit, fungi, gums, and nectar. Because they mostly live exclusively in bushland, they are rarely exposed to a human-influenced diet. The adult ants mainly eat nectar and honeydew, but the ant larvae are carnivores that eat small insects brought back to them by hunting worker ants. The workers can also regurgitate food back in the nest so other ants can consume it.

Bulldog Ant Adaptations

> These ants have highly advanced vision and therefore they are able to look out for enemies from a distance of 1 metre.
> They use their venom to give anaphylactic shock which can kill their victims. In case of humans they may cause skin allergies and sometimes death.
> The strong claw-like mandibles help them in searching for food, crushing preys and to scare off predators.
> These ants have two pair of jaws – the outer pair used for carrying objects and the inner pair is used for chewing food.

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The Life Cycle of the Bulldog Ant

An ant’s life cycle passes through four distinct stages of egg, larva, pupa and adult. The eggs hatch into small grubs which grow into worker ants who expand the nest. The fertilized eggs hatch into females and unfertilized ones into males. The queen leaves the nest at night to find food for its babies. Forager ants who go out searching for food regurgitate the fluid food to feed other members of the colony. Young larvae are usually fed dead insects and grubs. In some species of bull ants, there are no colonies and the queen attacks the nest of other species to kill the queen before taking over the entire colony.

The bulldog ants live for 8 to 10 weeks passing through the four stages of life. However, in some cases, the queen ant may live for several years.

During certain times of the year, these ants develop wings. When the young queen is ready to mate she flies out to meet other males. These winged male and queens fly into the air and mate after which the males die. After mating, the queens’s wings fall off and she starts building an anthill. The fertilized queen starts a nest by digging small chambers where she lays her eggs. The queen spends her entire life laying eggs.

Quick Facts about Bulldog Ants

> Unlike other ants, they communicate by touch and smell.

> They help in decomposition of dead plants and animals in the wild.

> The sting of these ants hurt a lot since they inject formic acid.

> Scientists have observed that these ants secrete a special chemical that kills pollen. Scientists are testing this secretion to check if it can be used to cure human diseases.

> Unlike other ants they are attracted to flowers but have no role in pollination.

> Some bulldog ants are known to jump and leap upto 2 inches when they are disturbed.

Bulldog Ant Pictures

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Videos and Documentary on Bulldog Ants

Giant Killer Bulldog Ants

ANTS – Nature’s Secret Power

European Wasp Vs Bull Ant

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Document PDFs on Bulldog Ants

A Guide to the Ants of South-Western Australia
Attack Behaviour and Distance Perception in the Australian Bulldog Ant
Bulldog Ants of the Eocene Okanagan Highlands
Foraging Ecology of the Night-Active Bull Ant
The Antennal Sensory Array of the Bull Ant

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In the Life of a Bulldog Ant

Mixed nanoparticle systems may help purify water and generate hydrogen

A new catalyst could have dramatic environmental benefits if it can live up to its potential, suggests research from Singapore. A*STAR researchers have produced a catalyst with gold-nanoparticle antennas that can improve water quality in daylight and also generate hydrogen as a green energy source.

Improved photocatalyst microparticles containing gold nanoparticles can be used to purify water. Credit: A*STAR Institute of Materials Research and Engineering

This water purification technology was developed by He-Kuan Luo, Andy Hor and colleagues from the A*STAR Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE). “Any innovative and benign technology that can remove or destroy organic pollutants from water under ambient conditions is highly welcome,” explains Hor, who is executive director of the IMRE and also affiliated with the National University of Singapore.

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Photocatalytic materials harness sunlight to create electrical charges, which provide the energy needed to drive chemical reactions in molecules attached to the catalyst’s surface. In addition to decomposing harmful molecules in water, photocatalysts are used to split water into its components of oxygen and hydrogen; hydrogen can then be employed as a green energy source.

Hor and his team set out to improve an existing catalyst. Oxygen-based compounds such as strontium titanate (SrTiO3) look promising, as they are robust and stable materials and are suitable for use in water. One of the team’s innovations was to enhance its catalytic activity by adding small quantities of the metal lanthanum, which provides additional usable electrical charges.

Catalysts also need to capture a sufficient amount of sunlight to catalyze chemical reactions. So to enable the photocatalyst to harvest more light, the scientists attached gold nanoparticles to the lanthanum-doped SrTiO3 microspheres (see image). These gold nanoparticles are enriched with electrons and hence act as antennas, concentrating light to accelerate the catalytic reaction.

The porous structure of the microspheres results in a large surface area, as it provides more binding space for organic molecules to dock to. A single gram of the material has a surface area of about 100 square meters. “The large surface area plays a critical role in achieving a good photocatalytic activity,” comments Luo.

To demonstrate the efficiency of these catalysts, the researchers studied how they decomposed the dye rhodamine B in water. Within four hours of exposure to visible light 92 per cent of the dye was gone, which is much faster than conventional catalysts that lack gold nanoparticles.

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These microparticles can also be used for water splitting, says Luo. The team showed that the microparticles with gold nanoparticles performed better in water-splitting experiments than those without, further highlighting the versatility and effectiveness of these microspheres.

Mixed nanoparticle systems may help purify water and generate hydrogen

Discovery advances ferroelectrics in quest for lower power transistors

An article released today by the journal Nature Materials describes the first direct observation of a long-hypothesized but elusive phenomenon called “negative capacitance.” The work describes a unique reaction of electrical charge to applied voltage in a ferroelectric material that could open the door to a radical reduction in the power consumed by transistors and the devices containing them.

The atomic structure of a ferroelectric material exhibits the so-called “negative capacitance” effect. If successfully built into transistors, it could drastically reduce the electricity needed to run computer processors and other transistor-dependent devices. Credit: Suraj S. Cheema

Capacitance is the ability of a material to store an electrical charge. Ordinary capacitors—found in virtually all electronic devices—store charge as a voltage is applied to them. The new phenomenon has a paradoxical response: when the applied voltage is increased, the charge goes down. Hence its name, negative capacitance.

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“This property, if successfully integrated into transistors, could reduce the amount of power they consume by at least an order of magnitude, and perhaps much more,” says the paper’s lead author Asif Khan. That would lead to longer-lasting cell phone batteries, less energy-consumptive computers of all types, and, perhaps even more importantly, could extend by decades the trend toward faster, smaller processors that has defined the digital revolution since its birth.

Without a major breakthrough of this sort, the trend toward miniaturization and increased function is threatened by the physical demands of transistors operating at a nano scale. Even though the tiny switches can be made ever smaller, the amount of power they need to be turned on and off can be reduced only so much. That limit is defined by what is known as the Boltzmann distribution of electrons—often called the Boltzmann Tyranny. Because they must be fed an irreducible amount of electricity, ultra-small transistors that are packed too tightly cannot dissipate the heat they generate to avoid self-immolation.

In another decade or so, engineers will exhaust options for packing more computing power into ever tinier spaces, a consequence viewed with dread by device manufacturers, sensor developers, and a public addicted to ever smaller and more powerful devices.

The new research, conducted at UC Berkeley under the leadership of CITRIS researcher and associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences Sayeef Salahuddin, provides a possible way to overcome the Boltzmann Tyranny. It relies on the ability of certain materials to store energy intrinsically and then exploit it to amplify the input voltage. This could, in effect, potentially “trick” a transistor into thinking that it has received the minimum amount of voltage necessary to operate. The result: less electricity is needed to turn a transistor on or off, which is the universal operation at the core of all computer processing.

The material used to achieve negative capacitance falls in a class of crystalline materials called ferroelectrics, which was first described in the 1940s. These materials have long been researched for memory applications and commercial storage technologies. Ferroelectrics are also popular materials for frequency control circuits and many microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) applications. However, the possibility of using these materials for energy efficient transistors was first proposed by Salahuddin in 2008, right before he joined Berkeley as an assistant professor.

Over the past six years, Khan—one of Salahuddin’s first graduate students at Berkeley—has used pulse lasers to grow many kinds of ferroelectric materials and has devised and revised ingenious ways to test for their negative capacitance.

In addition to transforming the way transistors work, negative capacitance could also potentially be used to develop high-density memory storage devices, super capacitors, coil-free oscillators and resonators, and for harvesting energy from the environment.

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Exploiting the negative capacitance of ferroelectrics is one in a list of strategies for reducing the per-joule cost of storing a single bit of information, says UC Berkeley professor of materials science, engineering, and physics Ramamoorthy Ramesh, another of the paper’s authors. Ramesh’s decades of seminal work on ferroelectric materials and device structures for manipulating them underlies the group’s findings.

“We have just launched a program called the attojoule-per-bit program. It is an effort to reduce the total energy consumed for manipulating a bit to one attojoule (10-18),” says Ramesh. To achieve that kind of per-bit energy consumption, we need to take advantage of all possible pathways. The negative capacitance of ferroelectrics is going to be a very important one,” he says.

This work was enabled by access to CITRIS’s Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory, a research facility on the UC Berkeley campus that specifically encourages the exploration of new materials and processes. One of the most advanced academic nanofabrication labs of its type in the world, the NanoLab is the birthplace of other game-changing technologies, such as the three-dimensional FinFET transistor that has led the way to scaling far beyond the limits of ordinary transistors. “Today,” says professor Ming Wu, Marvell NanoLab Faculty Director, “every single transistor built for next-generation microprocessors or computers is FinFET.”

“CITRIS’s Marvell NanoLab has state-of-the-art equipment for making semiconductor devices and integrated circuits,” says Wu. “But we take these tools and capabilities and apply them to materials that are so new that industry fabrication labs would not touch them. New materials like these negative capacitance ferroelectrics are not only welcome here, they are actively encouraged.”

“The next step,” says Salahuddin, “is to try to make actual transistors such that they can exploit the new phenomenon, We need to make sure they are compatible with silicon processing, that they are manufacturable, and that the measurement techniques we’ve now proven in principle are practical and scalable.”

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– Credit and Resource –

More information: “Negative capacitance in a ferroelectric capacitor.” Nature Materials (2014) DOI: 10.1038/nmat4148

Provided by University of California – Berkeley search and more info website

Discovery advances ferroelectrics in quest for lower power transistors

Is the Higgs boson a piece of the matter-antimatter puzzle?

Several experiments, including the BaBar experiment at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, have helped explain some – but not all – of the imbalance between matter and antimatter in the universe. Now a SLAC theorist and his colleagues have laid out a possible method for determining if the Higgs boson is involved.

In this illustration, two protons collide at high energy, producing a Higgs boson that instantly decays, producing two tau particles. The rest of the energy from the collision sprays outward in two jets (pink cones). Measuring the angle between these jets could reveal whether or not the Higgs is involved in charge-parity (CP) violation, which says that nature treats a particle and its oppositely charged antiparticle differently. A SLAC researcher and his colleagues propose such an experiment in a recent paper in Physical Review D. Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

In a paper published in Physical Review D, they suggest that scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where the Higgs was discovered, look for a specific kind of Higgs decay when the collider starts up again in 2015. The details of that decay could tell them whether or not the Higgs has a say in the matter-antimatter imbalance.

“The time to plan a search strategy is now,” said Matt Dolan, a research associate in SLAC’s Particle Theory group and co-author of the paper. “That way, when the LHC begins to operate at full strength we’ll be ready.”

Why there’s more matter than antimatter is one of the biggest questions confounding particle physicists and cosmologists, and it cuts to the heart of our own existence. In the time following the Big Bang, when the budding universe cooled enough for matter to form, most matter-antimatter particle pairs that popped into existence annihilated each other. Yet something tipped the balance in favor of matter, or we – and stars, planets, galaxies, life – would not be here.

The recently discovered Higgs boson is directly connected to the issues of mass and matter. Asking whether the Higgs is involved in the preponderance of matter over antimatter seems a reasonable question.

The paper is based on a phenomenon called CP – or charge-parity – violation, the same phenomenon investigated by BaBar. CP violation means that nature treats a particle and its oppositely charged mirror-image version differently.

“Searching for CP violation at the LHC is tricky,” Dolan said. “We’ve just started to look into the properties of the Higgs, and the experiments must be very carefully designed if we are to improve our understanding of how the Higgs behaves under different conditions.”

First, researchers need to confirm that the Higgs fits into the Standard Model, our current best explanation of matter, energy and the processes that turned them into us. A Higgs that fits the Standard Model where CP violation is concerned is called CP-even; one that does not is called CP-odd. A tell-tale sign that the Higgs is involved in CP violation is if it’s a mixture of even and odd.

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The theorists proposed that experimenters look for a process in which a Higgs decays into two tau particles, which are like supersized cousins of electrons, while the remainder of the energy from the original proton-proton collision sprays outward in two jets. Any mix of CP-even and CP-odd in the Higgs is revealed by the angle between the two jets.

“This is a very high-profile and involved analysis,” said Philip Harris, a staff physicist at CERN and co-author of the paper along with Martin Jankowiak of the University of Heidelberg and Michael Spannowsky of Durham University. A member of the CMS collaboration, Harris focuses on Higgs-to-tau-tau decays, evidence of which has only recently begun to mount.

“I wanted to add a CP violation measurement to our analysis, and what Matt, Martin and Michael proposed is the most viable avenue,” Harris said, adding that he’s looking forward to all the data the LHC will generate when it starts up again early next year at its full design strength.

“Even with just a few months of data we can start to make real statements about the Higgs and CP violation,” he said.

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– Credit and Resource –

More information: Matthew Dolan et al., Physical Review D, 21 October 2014 . DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.90.073008

Provided by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory search and more info website

Is the Higgs boson a piece of the matter-antimatter puzzle?

Researchers combine logic, memory to build a 'high-rise' chip

For decades, the mantra of electronics has been smaller, faster, cheaper. Today, Stanford engineers add a fourth word – taller.

This illustration represents the four-layer prototype high-rise chip built by Stanford engineers. The bottom and top layers are logic transistors. Sandwiched between them are two layers of memory. The vertical tubes are nanoscale electronic “elevators” that connect logic and memory, allowing them to work together to solve problems. Credit: Max Shulaker, Stanford

At a conference in San Francisco, a Stanford team will reveal how to build high-rise chips that could leapfrog the performance of the single-story logic and memory chips on today’s circuit cards.

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Those circuit cards are like busy cities in which logic chips compute and memory chips store data. But when the computer gets busy, the wires connecting logic and memory can get jammed.

The Stanford approach would end these jams by building layers of logic atop layers of memory to create a tightly interconnected high-rise chip. Many thousands of nanoscale electronic “elevators” would move data between the layers much faster, using less electricity, than the bottle-neck prone wires connecting single-story logic and memory chips today.

The work is led by Subhasish Mitra, a Stanford professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and H.-S. Philip Wong, the Williard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor in Stanford’s School of Engineering. They describe their new high-rise chip architecture in a paper being presented at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting on Dec. 15-17.

The researchers’ innovation leverages three breakthroughs.

The first is a new technology for creating transistors, those tiny gates that switch electricity on and off to create digital zeroes and ones. The second is a new type of computer memory that lends itself to multi-story fabrication. The third is a technique to build these new logic and memory technologies into high-rise structures in a radically different way than previous efforts to stack chips.

“This research is at an early stage, but our design and fabrication techniques are scalable,” Mitra said. “With further development this architecture could lead to computing performance that is much, much greater than anything available today.”

Wong said the prototype chip unveiled at IEDM shows how to put logic and memory together into three-dimensional structures that can be mass-produced.

“Paradigm shift is an overused concept, but here it is appropriate,” Wong said. “With this new architecture, electronics manufacturers could put the power of a supercomputer in your hand.”

Silicon heat

Engineers have been making silicon chips for decades, but the heat emanating from phones and laptops is evidence of a problem. Even when they are switched off, some electricity leaks out of silicon transistors. Users feel that as heat. But at a system level, the leakage drains batteries and wastes electricity.

Researchers have been trying to solve this major problem by creating carbon nanotubes – or CNT – transistors. They are so slender that nearly 2 billion CNTs could fit within a human hair. CNTs should leak less electricity than silicon because their tiny diameters are easier to pinch shut.

The image on the left depicts today’s single-story electronic circuit cards, where logic and memory chips exist as separate structures, connected by wires. Like city streets, those wires can get jammed with digital traffic going back and forth between logic and memory. On the right, Stanford engineers envision building layers of logic and memory to create skyscraper chips. Data would move up and down on nanoscale “elevators” to avoid traffic jams. Credit: Wong/Mitra Lab, Stanford

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Mitra and Wong are presenting a second paper at the conference showing how their team made some of the highest performance CNT transistors ever built.

They did this by solving a big hurdle: packing enough CNTs into a small enough area to make a useful chip.

Until now the standard process used to grow CNTs did not create a sufficient density of these tubes. The Stanford engineers solved this problem by developing an ingenious technique.

They started by growing CNTs the standard way, on round quartz wafers. Then they added their trick. They created what amounts to a metal film that acts like a tape. Using this adhesive process they lifted an entire crop of CNTs off the quartz growth medium and placed it onto a silicon wafer.

This silicon wafer became the foundation of their high-rise chip.

But first they had to fabricate a CNT layer with sufficient density to make a high performance logic device. So they went though this process 13 times, growing a crop of CNTs on the quartz wafer, and then using their transfer technique to lift and deposit these CNTs onto the silicon wafer.

Using this elegant technological fix, they achieved some of the highest density, highest performance CNTs ever made – especially given that they did this in an academic lab with less sophisticated equipment than a commercial fabrication plant.

Moreover, the Stanford team showed that they could perform this technique on more than one layer of logic as they created their high-rise chip.

What about the memory?

Creating high-performance layers of CNT transistors was only part of their innovation. Just as important was their ability to build a new type of memory directly atop each layer of CNTs.

Wong is a world leader in this new memory technology, which he unveiled at last year’s IEDM conference.

Unlike today’s memory chips, this new storage technology is not based on silicon.

Instead, the Stanford team fabricated memory using titanium nitride, hafnium oxide and platinum. This formed a metal/oxide/metal sandwich. Applying electricity to this three-metal sandwich one way causes it to resist the flow of electricity. Reversing the electric jolt causes the structure to conduct electricity again.

The change from resistive to conductive states is how this new memory technology creates digital zeroes and ones. The change in conductive states also explains its name: resistive random access memory, or RRAM.

Wong designed RRAM to use less energy than current memory, leading to prolonged battery life in mobile devices.

Inventing this new memory technology was also the key to creating the high-rise chip because RRAM can be made at much lower temperatures than silicon memory.

Interconnected layers

Max Shulaker and Tony Wu, Stanford graduate students in electrical engineering, created the techniques behind the four-story high-rise chip unveiled at the conference.

Everything hinged on the low-heat process for making RRAM and CNTs, which enabled them to fabricate each layer of memory directly atop each layer of CNT logic. While making each memory layer, they were able to drill thousands of interconnections into the logic layer below.

This multiplicity of connections is what enables the high-rise chip to avoid the traffic jams on conventional circuit cards.

There is no way to tightly interconnect layers using today’s conventional silicon-based logic and memory. That’s because it takes so much heat to build a layer of silicon memory – about 1,000 degrees centigrade – that any attempt to do so would melt the logic below.

Previous efforts to stack silicon chips could save space but not avoid the digital traffic jams. That’s because each layer would have to be built separately and connected by wires—which would still be prone to traffic jams, unlike the nanoscale elevators in the Stanford design.

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– Credit and Resource –

Provided by Stanford University

Researchers combine logic, memory to build a 'high-rise' chip

BPG image format judged awesome versus JPEG

If these three letters could talk, BPG, they would say something like “Farewell, JPEG.” Better Portable Graphics (BPG) is a new image format based on HEVC and supported by browsers with a small Javascript decoder. The format is intended to replace the JPEG image format when the file size or quality is an issue. BPG’s advantages include a high compression ratio, whereby files are much smaller than JPEG for similar quality.

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High Efficiency Video Coding is a video compression standard. Gannon Burgett said in Imaging Resource that the technology behind this new format is based on the same HEVC codec used in x265/H.265 video. This allows the BPG file format to handle 14 bits per color channel, lossless compression and even alpha support. “Its strength lies in its ability to produce JPEG quality images at roughly half the size.” The BPG site said that “BPG natively supports 8 to 14 bits per channel when most other formats use 8 bits (including most of the JPEG implementations and WEBP). It gives a higher dynamic range (which is important for cameras and new displays) and a slightly better compression ratio (because there are less rounding errors in the decoder).”

BPG was created by French programmer Fabrice Bellard. Matt Smith, an editor with Digital Trends, said Bellard is known for QEMU, a hardware virtualization program, and FFmpeg, a cross-platform multimedia codec library. Other accomplishments, from Bellard’s page list, include a new ASNI compiler, “generating small and efficient C code,” and a PC emulator in Javascript.

So is this the end for JPEG? While “new” is a catchy invitation for breakfast cereals, the same cannot be said for file formats. “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it” seems to play the loudest. “As with any new file format, the problem is ensuring it catches on with developers, programmers, camera companies and more,” said Burgett. Smith similarly wrote that “The new file format, while clearly superior to JPEG, is new…Getting companies to add the feature is a chicken-and-egg problem; no one will be publishing BPG images until there’s support, but there’s no reason to add support until BPG begins to appear on websites.”

Nonetheless, Smith said he hoped hope the file format does receive support in the near future. Its increase in quality is apparent, and its adoption could let photographers share high-quality shots without resorting to formats like PNG and BMP. Paul Monckton, who writes about photography, thinks that BPG is quite impressive: “Bellard’s technique delivers a huge leap in compression performance,” he wrote in Forbes, and “generates much higher quality images than JPEG for any given size of file.” Like other observers, though, Monckton said BPG as a new standard image format would be difficult for reasons of compatibility. With almost no existing software currently supporting the BPG format, he said, it would take a lot for it to gain widespread popularity. Sebastian Anthony wrote in ExtremeTech, “it’s very hard to unseat an incumbent file format (or, more accurately, a compression technology). The fact is, despite any misgivings we might have about JPEGs or GIFs, almost every computer system in the world can display them—and generally, in the grand scheme of communication, it’s much more important to make sure that your message was seen at all, rather than making sure the message is as small and as optimized as possible.”

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BPG image format judged awesome versus JPEG

Abiogenesis: A Theory on The Origins of Life

By now, we all know how evolution works. At least, most of us have a basic understanding of how it functions. At its most fundamental level, evolution is change over time. More specifically, it is changes within a biological population over successive generations.

The origin of life is one of the biggest mysteries in science (Credit: Jenny Mottar)

Ultimately, biological complexity is one of the most important things to come out of evolution. Things started simple. Then genes mutated, cells interacted with their environment, mitochondria stopped being living organisms and started being part of a cell and—Tada—complex life.

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So we know where the complexity and diversity of life came from. We have elephants, and snakes, HIV, and the tardigrade because of evolution. That theory is set. But we don’t know where itself life came from. We don’t understand the start of it all—abiogenesis.

Abiogenesis is the origin of life from non-living matter. And it has been a burning question for some time (since long before Darwin came up with the Theory of Evolution). But there may be an answer looming on the horizon. And this answer is surprisingly simple: Life is inevitable.

In a number of papers, physicists have argued that the occurrence of life is a matter of inevitability, and they have a sound formula to support their claims. The new(ish) models that physicists have come up with are formulated on previously established theories in physics, and they conclude that matter will generally develop into systems that, when “driven by an external source of energy” and “surrounded by a heat bath,” become increasingly efficient at dissipating energy.

This sounds a little tricky, so let’s break it down.

In order to understand the theory, you need to understand the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.” The second law states, “The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.”

To put it very bluntly, entropy means that things fall apart. Hot things cool off, gas will diffuse through air, a house crumbles but does not instantaneously add on a new kitchen. Thus, as previously stated, things fall apart; they spread out; energy tends to diffuse as time progresses. Entropy is basically a measure of this tendency.

It is measuring how dispersed the energy is among the particles in a system, and how diffuse those particles are throughout space.

We know that, on the whole, entropy always increases (that things spread apart) because of a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated. Thus, as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out.

This is where the formula comes in. MIT physicist Jeremy England explains, “We can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there [for example, think about how the overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates].

This system is pretty disordered, therefore higher entropy. (Credit: Greg L.)

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This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments.”

Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time. As England put it, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.”

Some would argue that there is no principle that entropy must be efficient. Yet, work has already been done in this area. Ilya Prigogine, a prominent Belgian physical chemist who is known for his work on dissipative structures, observed that under a generalized chemical potential, we see that material self-organizes into systems which augment the dissipation of that potential.

Moreover, Karo Michaelian, from the Department of Experimental Physics at UNAM, hypothesizes in a paper, “RNA and DNA are the most efficient of all known molecules for absorbing the intense ultraviolet light that penetrated the dense early atmosphere and are remarkably rapid in transforming this light into heat in the presence of liquid water. From this perspective, the origin and evolution of life, inseparable from water and the water cycle, can be understood as resulting from the natural thermodynamic imperative of increasing the entropy production of the Earth in its interaction with its solar environment.”

Notably, at this point, the ideas are highly speculative. However, don’t read the last sentence and assume that it means that the ideas are unscientific or baseless conjecture (please, read the linked articles for more information on these theories). Moreover, the theoretical results are (hereto) considered valid. The interpretation is where some think the speculation is rather high (the interpretation is the assertion that his formula represents the driving force behind the formation of life). Yet, there are already ideas about how we might test this in a lab.

You can see the formula here, or learn more about these ideas in the video below:

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Abiogenesis: A Theory on The Origins of Life