Panspermia, Past and Present: Astrophysical and Biophysical Conditions for the Dissemination of Life in Space

Astronomically, there are viable mechanisms for distributing organic material throughout the Milky Way. Biologically, the destructive effects of ultraviolet light and cosmic rays means that the majority of organisms arrive broken and dead on a new world. The likelihood of conventional forms of panspermia must therefore be considered low. However, the information content of dam-aged biological molecules might serve to seed new life (necropanspermia).Comment: Accepted for publication in Space Science Review

Survey of advances and challenges in intelligent autonomy for distributed cyber-physical systems

With the evolution of the Internet of things and smart cities, a new trend of the Internet of simulation has emerged to utilise the technologies of cloud, edge, fog computing, and high-performance computing for design and analysis of complex cyber-physical systems using simulation. These technologies although being applied to the domains of big data and deep learning are not adequate to cope with the scale and complexity of emerging connected, smart, and autonomous systems. This study explores the existing state-of-the-art in automating, augmenting, and integrating systems across the domains of smart cities, autonomous vehicles, energy efficiency, smart manufacturing in Industry 4.0, and healthcare. This is expanded to look at existing computational infrastructure and how it can be used to support these applications. A detailed review is presented of advances in approaches providing and supporting intelligence as a service. Finally, some of the remaining challenges due to the explosion of data streams; issues of safety and security; and others related to big data, a model of reality, augmentation of systems, and computation are examined

Delta-Confluent Drawings

We generalize the tree-confluent graphs to a broader class of graphs called Delta-confluent graphs. This class of graphs and distance-hereditary graphs, a well-known class of graphs, coincide. Some results about the visualization of Delta-confluent graphs are also given.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures. A preliminary version of this work was presented at the 13th Int. Symp. Graph Drawing, Limerick, Ireland, September 200