Novia’s Reviews > Wonders of Life: Exploring the Most Extraordinary Phenomenon in the Universe > Status Update

Given there are over half a trillion galaxies in the observable Universe, the idea that there are no other planets out there with webs of life at least as complex as our own seems to me to be an absurd proposition.

the paramecium has no nervous system or brain, and yet it has a rudimentary sense of touch; when it bumps into something, it changes its behaviour. The biochemical mechanism underlying the paramecium’s touch response is known as an action potential.

Sequenced in 2011, the orangutan became the third species of hominid after humans and chimpanzees to have its genome completely sequenced.

The second law of thermodynamics can be expressed as ‘No process is possible in which the sole result is the absorption of heat from a reservoir and its complete conversion into work.’ This means that it is impossible to build solar panels that are 100 per cent efficient.

In a sense, this is all there is to the Universe! If no energy is ‘flowing’ – a colloquialism by which we mean ‘being transformed from one form to another’ – then nothing is happening at all. Here is the first step on the road to answering Schrödinger’s question – What is Life? Whatever it is, it is a process by which energy is transformed from one form to another