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CPM Seminar
David Boal
Physics Department Within a decade, NASA expects to bring Martian rocks to Earth for analysis, adding another dimension to the search for extraterrestrial life. Already, the suggestion that submicron features on a Martian meteorite might be remnants of early life forms has posed a series of questions about extraterrestrial cells: Is there a lower limit to the size of a viable cell? What architectural scaffolding is required to produce cells of various shapes? How must the physical attributes of a cell - for example, the thickness of its boundary - scale with its size? As it applies to terrestrial cells, many of the underlying principles of Nature's building code have been determined in the past two decades. This code helps us to understand the limits to cell architecture and to assess the likelihood that a particular cell design could arise under various conditions in the history of a planet.
Thursday, November 21st 2002, 15:30 |