Postdoctoral fellow Hyunju Kim will speak at the upcoming Gordon Research Seminar on the Origin of Life, to be held at the Hotel Galvez in Galveston TX. Her talk titled "New Scaling Relation for Information Transfer in Biological Networks" will be part of a session exploring the Laws and Principles underlying the emergence of life. The full schedule of talks is available here.

Article on the NASA Astrobiology website on "Seeking New Insight into Life's Origin" highlights the recent "Re-Conceptualizing the Origins of Life" conference held at the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC with quotes from Sara Walker. Read the full article here.

Emergence@ASU graduate student Cole Mathis heads to the Santa Fe Institute Jan. 13th to give a seminar on his recent paper titled "The Emergence of Life as a 1st Order Phase Transition".  More details are here, abstract below. 



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​Abstract.  Life is a state of matter characterized by a stable pattern of non-equilibrium behavior.  Replication, central to maintenance of pattern, is thought to play an important role in driving the transition from non-living to living matter. Using a kinetic Monte-Carlo simulation of an artificial chemistry, we demonstrate the existence of a phase transition from non-life to life (defined as non-replicating and replicating systems respectively). The transition is first order and occurs spontaneously in the absence of external tuning and has features which differ from those described previously.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Enrico Borriello is joining the team as a postdoctoral fellow! Enrico joins us from the Cosmology group at Arizona State University making the transition from studying astroparticle physics to the physics of life. One of the projects he'll be working on with the group is the informational architecture of developmental networks.