OoL digest — February 14th edition

Astrobiology

Only extraordinary volcanism can explain the presence of parts per billion phosphine on Venus – Bains et al. – Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

The Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) on the James Webb Space Telescope IV. Capabilities and predicted performance for exoplanet characterization – Birkmann et al. – preprint

A candidate short-period sub-Earth orbiting Proxima Centauri – Faria et al. – Astronomy & Astrophysics

Intelligence as a planetary scale process – Frank et al. – International Journal of Astrobiology

Integrated Molar Absorptivity of Mid- and Far-Infrared Spectra of Alanine and a Selection of Other Five Amino Acids of Astrobiological Relevance – Iglesias-Groth et al. – Astrobiology

A pathway to peptides in space through the condensation of atomic carbon – Krasnokutski et al. – Nature Astronomy

Pebbles and sand on asteroid (162173) Ryugu: In situ observation and particles returned to Earth – Tachibana et al. – Science

Biochemistry

Origin of life: protoribosome forms peptide bonds and links RNA and protein dominated worlds – Bose et al. – Nucleic Acids Research

Structure-function relationships in mitochondrial transcriptional condensates – Feric et al. – preprint

Peptides before and during the nucleotide world: an origins story emphasizing cooperation between proteins and nucleic acids – Fried et al. – Journal of The Royal Society Interface

Nonenzymatic assembly of active chimeric ribozymes from aminoacylated RNA oligonucleotides – Radakovic et al. – Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Thermodynamics of evolution and the origin of life – Vanchurin et al. – Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Biology

Toward a theory of evolution as multilevel learning – Vanchurin et al. – Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Biophysics

Symmetry, Thermodynamics, and Topology in Active Matter – Bowick et al. – Physical Review X

Did bio-homochirality arise from spin-polarized electron? – Wang – preprint

Mathematical biology

Autocatalytic recombination systems: A reaction network perspective – Craciun et al. – Mathematical Biosciences

Planetary Science

Assessing planetary complexity and potential agnostic biosignatures using epsilon machines – Bartlett et al. – Nature Astronomy

The formation of crystalline minerals and their role in the origin of life on Earth – Pérez-Aguilar et al. – Progress in Crystal Growth and Characterization of Materials

Carbon Ion Fluxes at Mars: First Results of Tailward Flows From MAVEN-STATIC – Pickett et al. – Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics

Stratification in planetary cores by liquid immiscibility in Fe-S-H – Yokoo et al. – Nature Communications