title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: Nowitzki paced Dallas to a 60-win season. The team finished with the third-best record in the league behind the defending champion San Antonio Spurs and the defending Eastern Conference champion Detroit Pistons. As in the 2004–05 season, he finished third in the league's MVP voting, this time behind Nash and LeBron James. He was again elected to the first team All-NBA squad. Nowitzki averaged 27.0 points, 11.7 rebounds, and 2.9 assists in the playoffs. In the opening round, the Mavericks swept the Memphis Grizzlies, 4–0, with Nowitzki making a clutch three-pointer in the closing seconds of Game 3 which tied the game and forced overtime. In the Western Conference Semi-finals, the Mavericks played against the San Antonio Spurs again. After splitting the first six games, the Mavericks took a 20-point lead in Game 7 before Spur Manu Ginóbili broke a tie at 101 by hitting a 3 with 30 seconds left. On the next play, Nowitzki completed a three-point play, which tied the game at 104. In the end, the Mavericks won, 119–111, and Nowitzki ended the game with 37 points and 15 rebounds. Nowitzki commented: "I don't know how the ball went in. Manu hit my hand. It was a lucky bounce." The Mavericks advanced to the Western Conference Finals, where they again met the Suns. Nowitzki scored 50 points to lead the Mavericks to a victory in the crucial Game 5 with the series tied at 2; the Mavericks won the series in six games and faced the Miami Heat in the 2006 NBA Finals. A content Nowitzki commented: "We've been a good road team all season long, we believed in each other. We went through some ups and downs this season, but the playoffs are all about showing heart and playing together." Of Nowitzki's performance, ESPN columnist Bill Simmons wrote, "Dirk is playing at a higher level than any forward since [Larry] Bird."


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: The Mavericks took an early 2–0 Finals lead, but then gave away a late 15-point lead in a Game 3 loss. Nowitzki only made 20 of his last 55 shots in the final three games as the Mavericks lost the Finals series, 4–2, to the Heat. The German was criticized by ESPN as "clearly... not as his best this series" and remarked: "That was a tough loss (in Game 3) and that really changed the whole momentum of the series."


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: In the 2006–07 season, Nowitzki shot a career-best 50.2% from the field, recorded averages of 24.6 points, 8.9 rebounds, and 3.4 assists, and led the Mavericks to a franchise-high 67 wins and the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference in the 2007 NBA Playoffs. He averaged 50% from the field, 40% for three-pointers, and 90% from the free-throw line, becoming (at the time) only the fifth player in NBA history to join the 50–40–90 club. Nowitzki was touted as the overwhelming favorite for the Most Valuable Player award and was expected to lead the Mavericks to an easy win against the eighth-seed Golden State Warriors, despite the Warriors having won all three regular-season meetings against Dallas. However, the Mavericks ended up losing to the Warriors in six games, marking the first time a No. 8 seed had beaten the No. 1 seed in a best-of-seven series in NBA history. In the clinching Game 6, Nowitzki shot just 2–13 from the field for only eight points. Defended by Stephen Jackson, Nowitzki averaged nearly five points less than his regular-season average in that series and shot 38.3% from the field as compared to 50.2% during the regular season. He described that loss as a low point in his career: "This series, I couldn't put my stamp on it the way I wanted to. That's why I'm very disappointed." In spite of this historic playoffs loss, Nowitzki was named the NBA's regular-season Most Valuable Player and beat his friend and back-to-back NBA MVP Nash with more than 100 votes. He also became the first European player in NBA history to receive the honor.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: The 2007–08 campaign saw another first-round playoff exit for Nowitzki and the Mavericks. Despite a mid-season trade that brought veteran NBA All-Star Jason Kidd to Dallas, the Mavericks finished seventh in a highly competitive Western Conference. Nowitzki averaged 23.6 points, 8.6 rebounds, and a career-high 3.5 assists for the season. In the playoffs, they faced rising star Chris Paul's New Orleans Hornets, and were eliminated in five games. The playoff loss led to the firing of Avery Johnson as head coach and the eventual hiring of Rick Carlisle. The few positive highlights that season for Nowitzki were his first career triple-double against the Milwaukee Bucks on February 6, 2008, with 29 points, 10 rebounds, and a career-high 12 assists, and on March 8, 2008 (34 points against the New Jersey Nets), when he surpassed Rolando Blackman with his 16,644th point to become the Mavericks' all-time career points leader.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: The 2008–09 NBA season saw Nowitzki finish with averages of 25.9 points, 8.4 rebounds, and 2.4 assists. He was fourth in the league in scoring, and garnered his fourth All-NBA First Team selection. He also made the 2009 All-Star game, his eighth appearance. Nowitzki led Dallas to a tight finish towards the playoffs, finishing 50–32 for the season (6th in the West), after a slow 2–7 start. In the playoffs, the German led Dallas to an upset win over long-time rival San Antonio (the third seed), winning the first-round series, 4–1. The Mavericks, however, fell short against the Denver Nuggets, 4–1, in the second round, with Nowitzki averaging 34.4 points, 11.6 rebounds, and 4 assists in the series.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: The Mavericks finished the 2009–10 NBA season as the second seed for the 2010 NBA Playoffs. Notable additions to the squad were multiple All-Stars Shawn Marion and Caron Butler, with the latter coming in the second half of the season. On January 13, 2010, Nowitzki became the 34th player in NBA history—and the first European—to hit the 20,000-point milestone, while ending the regular season with averages of 25 points, 7.7 rebounds, 2.7 assists, and 1 block. He was selected to the 2010 All-Star Game, his ninth appearance. The Mavericks faced off against San Antonio once more in the first round of the playoffs, but for the third time in four seasons, they failed to progress to the next round. Nowitzki became a free agent after the season, but signed a four-year, $80 million deal to remain in Dallas.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: Prior to the 2010–11 season, the Mavericks traded for center Tyson Chandler. Nowitzki was injured in the middle of the season, but finished the regular season with averages of 23 points, 7 rebounds, and 3 assists. Despite missing nine games, Nowitzki was selected to the All-Star Game for the tenth time. The Mavericks defeated Portland in the first round of the playoffs and swept the two-time defending champion Lakers in the Conference Semifinals. In the Conference Finals, they faced the Oklahoma City Thunder and their All-NBA duo of Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook. In Game 1, Nowitzki scored 48 points and set an NBA record of 24 consecutive free throws made in a game as well as a record for most free throws in a game without a miss. In Game 4, with Dallas leading the series 2–1, Nowitzki scored 40 points to rally his team from a 99–84 fourth-quarter deficit to a 112–105 overtime victory. Dallas won the Western Conference title in Game Five.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: In the 2011 NBA Finals, Dallas once again faced the Miami Heat, which had acquired All-Stars LeBron James and Chris Bosh before the season began. During a Game 1 loss in Miami, Nowitzki tore a tendon in his left middle finger; however, MRIs were negative, and Nowitzki vowed that the injury would not be a factor. In Game 2, he led a Dallas rally from an 88–73 fourth-quarter deficit, making a driving left-handed layup over Bosh to tie the series at 1. Miami took a 2–1 series lead after Nowitzki missed a potential game-tying shot at the end of Game 3. Despite carrying a fever in Game 4, he hit the winning basket to tie the series yet again at 2, evoking comparisons to Michael Jordan's "Flu Game" against Utah in the 1997 NBA Finals. Dallas went on to win the next two games, with Nowitzki scoring 10 fourth-quarter points in the series-clinching game in Miami. The championship was the first in the history of the franchise. Nowitzki was named NBA Finals Most Valuable Player.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: As Dallas celebrated their title, the NBA was in a lockout that ended on December 8, 2011. The defending champions lost core players, such as DeShawn Stevenson, J. J. Barea, Peja Stojaković, and Tyson Chandler, while adding Lamar Odom, Delonte West, and veteran all-star Vince Carter in free agency. The Mavericks played only two preseason games, which led to a slow start for Nowitzki. Nowitzki made his 11th straight All-Star game appearance in Orlando. Nowitzki led his team in scoring 45 times during the season. Nowitzki's streak of 11 seasons with 1,500 points came to an end after scoring 1,342 in the shortened NBA season. Dallas clinched the seventh spot in the West, and were matched against the Oklahoma City Thunder in the 2012 NBA Playoffs. The Thunder swept the Mavericks in four games.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: Before the season, Jason Kidd and Jason Terry left the Mavericks in free agency. Nowitzki underwent knee surgery in October 2012 and missed the first 27 games of the season. He returned on December 23, 2012, in a game against San Antonio. In January 2013, Nowitzki and some of his teammates made a pact not to shave their beards until the team reached .500. They were often called "The Beard Bros." On April 14, 2013, after a fadeaway jumper in a game against the New Orleans Hornets, Nowitzki became the 17th player in NBA history to score 25,000 points. The Mavs went on to win the game and climbed back to .500 with a 40–40 record, and Nowitzki shaved his beard. However the Mavericks missed the playoffs for the first time since Nowitzki's second season, ending their 12-year playoff streak.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: On January 29, 2014, Nowitzki scored his 26,000th point in a 115–117 loss to the Houston Rockets. In 35 minutes of play, he recorded 38 points, 17 rebounds, and 3 assists. On March 12, 2014, in a 108–101 victory over the Utah Jazz, Nowitzki finished the game with 31 points and passed John Havlicek on the NBA scoring list with 26,426 points. On April 8, 2014, Nowitzki scored his 26,712th point, passing Oscar Robertson to move to the 10th position on the all-time scoring list. Nowitzki led the Mavericks back to the playoffs where they faced their in-state rival San Antonio Spurs in the first round. Dallas lost the series in seven games, and the Spurs went on to win the NBA championship.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: On July 15, 2014, Nowitzki re-signed with the Mavericks to a reported three-year, $25 million contract. He was also reunited with former championship teammate Tyson Chandler, who was traded to Dallas after a three-year stint with New York. However, longtime teammate Shawn Marion signed with the Cleveland Cavaliers before the season.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: On November 11, 2014, Nowitzki scored 23 points to surpass Hakeem Olajuwon as the highest-scoring player born outside the United States, as the Mavericks came from 24 points down to defeat Sacramento, 106–98. Nowitzki hit a jumper from just inside the three-point line early in the fourth quarter to pass Olajuwon at No. 9, and he finished the night at 26,953 career points. Six days later, Nowitzki became the fourth player in NBA history to eclipse 27,000 career points with the same franchise, joining Michael Jordan, Karl Malone and Kobe Bryant. On December 26 against the Los Angeles Lakers, Nowitzki passed Elvin Hayes for eighth place on the NBA's all-time scoring list. He went on to pass Moses Malone for seventh place on the NBA's all-time scoring list on January 5, 2015, in a 96–88 overtime win over the Brooklyn Nets. He recorded his 10,000th career rebound on March 24 against the San Antonio Spurs, and scored his 28,000th career point on April 1 against the Oklahoma City Thunder.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: The Mavericks finished the regular season as the No. 7 seed in the Western Conference with a record of 50–32. They faced the Houston Rockets in the first round of the playoffs and lost the series in five games.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: On November 11, 2015, Nowitzki scored a season-high 31 points in a 118–108 win over the Los Angeles Clippers. He also grabbed a team-high 11 rebounds and passed former teammate Shawn Marion for 15th on the all-time career rebounding list. On December 23, Nowitzki moved past Shaquille O'Neal into sixth place on the NBA's career scoring list, then made the go-ahead basket with 19.2 seconds left in overtime to help the Mavericks defeat the Brooklyn Nets, 119–118. On February 21, he scored 18 points against the Philadelphia 76ers, becoming the sixth player in NBA history to reach 29,000 career points. On March 20, he set a new season high with 40 points in a 132–120 overtime win over the Portland Trail Blazers. His 20th career 40-point game was his first since January 2014, and the first by a 37-year-old since Karl Malone in 2000–01.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: In Game 4 of the Mavericks' first-round playoff series against the Oklahoma City Thunder, Nowitzki passed Elgin Baylor (3,623 points) for 15th on the NBA's career playoff scoring list. The Mavericks lost the series four games to one.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: On July 27, 2016, Nowitzki re-signed with the Mavericks. Nowitzki missed several games early in the season with Achilles tendon problems. On March 7, 2017, in a 122–111 win over the Los Angeles Lakers, Nowitzki became the sixth player in NBA history to score 30,000 regular-season points. He also became the first international player to reach the milestone and one of only three to score all 30,000-plus with one team—the others being Karl Malone (Utah Jazz) and Kobe Bryant (L.A. Lakers). The Mavericks finished the season with a 33–49 record and missed the NBA Playoffs.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: Following the 2016–17 season, Nowitzki exercised his player option to become a free agent; this move allowed the Mavericks to re-sign him with less money and be able to pursue other free agents.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: On July 6, 2017, Nowitzki re-signed with the Mavericks on a two-year, $10 million contract (with a team option on the second year). On February 5, 2018, in a 104–101 loss to the Los Angeles Clippers, Nowitzki became the sixth player in NBA history to reach 50,000 career minutes. On February 28, 2018, in a 111–110 overtime loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder, Nowitzki reached 31,000 career points. On March 17, 2018, in a 114–106 loss to the Brooklyn Nets, Nowitzki played in his 1,463rd game, moving past Kevin Garnett into fifth place in the NBA career list. He had season-ending ankle surgery on April 5 after appearing in 77 of the first 78 games. The Mavericks finished the season with a 24–58 record and missed the NBA Playoffs.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: On July 23, 2018, Nowitzki re-signed with the Mavericks for the 2018–19 season. With his season debut on December 13, 2018, he set the NBA record for the most seasons played with the same team (21), breaking a tie with Kobe Bryant, who spent 20 seasons with the Lakers. He also became the fifth player in NBA history to play 21 seasons, tying an NBA record. Nowitzki was named to his 14th All-Star game as a special team roster addition. On March 18, 2019, Nowitzki became the sixth-highest scoring player of all time, surpassing Wilt Chamberlain's 31,419 points in a loss to the New Orleans Pelicans. In his team's final home game of the season, a 120–109 victory over the Phoenix Suns on April 9, Nowitzki scored 30 points, and announced his retirement in an emotional ceremony during which Charles Barkley, Larry Bird, Shawn Kemp, Scottie Pippen, and Detlef Schrempf appeared on the court to give laudatory speeches for Nowitzki. One day later, he played his final NBA game, recording a double-double with 20 points and 10 rebounds in a 105–94 loss to the Spurs.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: Nowitzki began playing for the German national basketball team in 1997. In his debut tournament, the EuroBasket 1999, the 21-year-old rookie emerged as the main German scorer, but Germany finished seventh and failed to qualify for the 2000 Olympic Games. In the EuroBasket 2001, Nowitzki was top scorer with 28.7 points per game, and narrowly lost the MVP vote to Serbian player Peja Stojaković. Germany reached the semi-finals and were close to beating host nation Turkey, but Hedo Türkoğlu hit a three-point buzzer beater to tie it, and the Turks eventually won in overtime. Germany then lost, 99–90, against Spain, and did not win a medal. However, with averages of 28.7 points and 9.1 rebounds, Nowitzki led the tournament in both statistics, and was voted to the All-Star team. Back home, the German basketball team attracted up to 3.7 million television viewers, a German basketball record at the time.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: Nowitzki earned his first medal when he led Germany to a bronze medal in the 2002 FIBA World Championship. In the quarter-finals against the Pau Gasol-led Spain, Spain was up 52–46 after three-quarters, but then Nowitzki scored 10 points in the last quarter and led Germany to a 70–62 win. In the semi-finals, his team played against the Argentinian team led by Manu Ginóbili, but despite leading, 74–69, four minutes from the end and despite Argentina losing Ginobili to a foot injury, the South Americans won, 86–80. However, the Germans won 117–94 against New Zealand in the consolation finals and won bronze, and Nowitzki, as the tournament's top scorer, (24.0 points per game), was elected the tournament MVP. Back in Germany, over four million television viewers followed the games, an all-time record in German basketball history.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: In a preparation game for EuroBasket 2003, Nowitzki suffered a foot injury after a collision with French player Florent Piétrus; as a result, Nowitzki played inconsistently and was also often target of hard fouls. In the decisive second-round match against Italy (only the winner was allowed to play the medal round), Germany lost, 86–84, finished ninth and did not qualify for the 2004 Olympic Games. Nowitzki scored 22.5 points per game (third overall), but in general seemed to lack focus and dominance due to his injury.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: In the EuroBasket 2005, Nowitzki led a depleted German squad into the Finals, beating title favorites Slovenia in the quarter-finals and Spain in the semi-finals on the way. EuroBasket pundits praised Nowitzki in both matches: against Slovenia (76–62), the forward scored a game-high 22 points and commented: "The Slovenians underestimated us. They said we were the team they wanted and that was wrong, you shouldn't do that in the quarter-finals." Against Spain (74–73), Nowitzki scored a game-high 27 points and scored the decisive basket: down by one and with only a few seconds to go, he drove on Spanish forward Jorge Garbajosa, and hit a baseline jump shot over Garbajosa's outstretched arms with 3.9 seconds to go. The German later commented: "It was indescribable. Garbajosa kind of pushed me towards the baseline so I just went with it." Despite losing the Finals, 78–62, to the Greeks, Nowitzki was the tournament's leading scorer (26.1 per game), and second-leading rebounder (10.6 per game), and shot blocker (1.9 per game), and he was also voted the Most Valuable Player of the tournament. When he was subbed out towards the end of the final, Nowitzki received a standing ovation from the crowd, which he later recalled as "one of the best moments of [his] career". The German team was awarded a silver medal.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: In the 2006 FIBA World Championship, Nowitzki led the German team to an eighth place and commented: "It's tough luck. But overall, finishing eighth in the world is not bad."


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: In the EuroBasket 2007, in which the top three teams automatically qualified for the 2008 Olympics, Nowitzki led Germany to a fifth place. He was the leading scorer with 24.0 points per game. The fifth place meant that Germany fell short of direct qualification, but was allowed to participate in the 2008 Olympic Qualifying Tournament. Nowitzki led Germany into a decisive match against Puerto Rico for the last remaining slot. In that crucial match, he scored a game-high 32 points and was vital for the 96–82 win which sent the German basketball team to their first Olympics since the 1992 Summer Olympics. Nowitzki was chosen to be the flag bearer for the German Olympic Team at the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Olympics. Nowitzki led the German team to a tenth-place finish, and averaged 17.0 points and 8.4 rebounds for the tournament.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: In 2009, Nowitzki skipped the EuroBasket 2009. In July 2010, he said that he would skip the 2010 FIBA World Championship. In summer 2011, Nowitzki played with Germany in the EuroBasket 2011, where the team reached ninth place. In 2015, Nowitzki captained Germany at the EuroBasket. They won only one game, and were eliminated in the group stage, on home soil. In January 2016, Nowitzki officially announced his retirement from Germany's national team. In his career with Germany's senior men's national team, he averaged 19.7 points, 7.5 rebounds, and 1.6 assists per game.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: Nowitzki was named the Euroscar European Basketball Player of the Year by the Italian sports newspaper "Gazzetta dello Sport" for five years running from 2002 to 2006 and again in 2011. He was also named the Mister Europa European Player of the Year by the Italian sports magazine "Superbasket" in 2005, and the FIBA Europe Men's Player of the Year twice in 2005 and 2011.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: The German Basketball Federation (DBB) honored Nowitzki with a jersey (number 14) retirement in September 2022, ahead of EuroBasket 2022. The ceremony was held on September 2, immediately before Germany's EuroBasket opening game against France in Cologne. DBB also announced that a replica of Nowitzki's national team jersey would hang from the arena rafters at all future Germany men's home games.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: Nowitzki was a versatile frontcourt player who mostly played the power forward, but also played center and small forward in his career. An exceptional shooter for his size, Nowitzki made 88% of his free throws, nearly 50% of his field goal attempts and nearly 40% of his 3-point shots, and won the 2006 NBA All-Star Three-Point Contest. In the 2006–07 season, Nowitzki became only the fifth member of the NBA's 50–40–90 Club for players who shot 50% or better from the field, 40% or better on three-pointers, and 90% or better on free-throws in a single season while achieving the NBA league minimum number of makes in each category.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: Nowitzki's shooting accuracy, combined with his long seven-foot frame and unique shooting mechanics (such as having a release point above his head), made his jump shots difficult to contest. Before the start of the 2011 NBA Finals, LeBron James called Nowitzki's one-legged fadeaway the second most unstoppable move ever, behind only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's skyhook.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: Additionally, Nowitzki could drive to the basket from the perimeter like few men his size were able to do. NBA.com lauded his versatility by stating: "The 7–0 forward who at times mans the pivot can strike fear in an opponent when he corrals a rebound and leads the break or prepares to launch a three-point bomb." Charles Barkley said the best way to guard Nowitzki was to "get a cigarette and a blindfold". Later on in his career, Nowitzki also developed an unorthodox post-up game, often backing down his opponents from the free-throw line or near the middle of the key, opening up the floor for multiple passing angles should a double team come his way.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: Nowitzki was the sixth player in NBA history, and the first European, to hit the 30,000-point milestone. Apart from being the Mavericks' all-time leader in points, rebounds, field goals, field goal attempts, 3-pointers, 3-point attempts, blocks, free throws, and free-throw attempts, Nowitzki made the NBA All-Star games fourteen times and the All-NBA Teams twelve times. He was voted NBA MVP of the 2006–07 NBA season, becoming the first European player to receive the honor, as well as the MVP of the 2011 NBA Finals. Other achievements include winning the 2006 Three-Point Contest and the 2017 NBA Teammate of the Year award, being voted European Basketballer of the Year five times in a row by "La Gazzetta dello Sport". He was the leading scorer and MVP of the 2002 FIBA World Championship, and EuroBasket 2005 tournaments.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: Nowitzki is the only player to record at least 30,000 points, 10,000 rebounds, 3,000 assists, 1,200 steals, 1,200 blocks and 1,500 three-point field goals.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: Nowitzki's older sister, Silke Nowitzki, described Nowitzki as a confident but low-key character, unspoiled by money and fame. He enjoys reading and playing the saxophone. Nowitzki passed his Abitur examination at Röntgen Gymnasium Grammar School of Würzburg. He founded the Dirk Nowitzki Foundation, a charity which aims at fighting poverty in Africa.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: Nowitzki dated Sybille Gerer, a female basketball player from his local club DJK Würzburg. The relationship started in 1992 and lasted for 10 years before it ended in 2002; Nowitzki said, "At the end, we found out we developed in separate ways... It did not work anymore, but we are still good friends." He added: "I surely want to start a family and have kids, but I cannot imagine it happening before I become 30."


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: In 2010, Nowitzki met and began dating Jessica Olsson, sister of twin Swedish footballers Martin Olsson and Marcus Olsson. The couple got married on July 20, 2012, at Nowitzki's home in Dallas. They have a daughter, born in July 2013 and two sons, born in March 2015 and November 2016. Though Nowitzki has considered acquiring U.S. citizenship, he remains a German national.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: Nowitzki acknowledged close ties to his mentor Holger Geschwindner, whom he called his best friend. He is also good friends with his ex-teammate Steve Nash. Nash said of playing with Nowitzki, "We were both joining a new club, living in a new city, we were both single and outsiders: this creates a bond... He made life easier for me and I for him... Our friendship was something solid in a very volatile world." Nowitzki added, "He would have also become a good friend if we had met at the supermarket."


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: Nowitzki's career has been chronicled in books. "", written by German sports journalists Dino Reisner and Holger Sauer, was published in 2004 by CoPress Munich. The 160-page hardcover book follows Nowitzki's beginnings in his native Würzburg, documents his entry into and ascent within the NBA, and ends at the beginning of the 2004–05 NBA season.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: In November 2011, the Würzburg local newspaper "Main-Post" published a 216-page book written by its sports journalists Jürgen Höpfl and Fabian Frühwirth: "Einfach Er – Dirk Nowitzki – Aus Würzburg an die Weltspitze", ("Just Him – Dirk Nowitzki – From Würzburg to the Top of the World"). Both Höpfl and Frühwirth accompanied Nowitzki throughout his career, collecting interviews and photos used in the book. It looks back on the 2011 NBA Finals but also has a strong focus on Nowitzki's relation to his hometown Würzburg and his career progression which began there. The book features insights from former coaches, family members, and friends.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: Thomas Pletzinger published in 2019 the 502-page biography "The Great Nowitzki", which was regarded as one of the best sports-biographies to have ever been published in German.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: In 2014, the film documentary "Nowitzki. The Perfect Shot" was released, which retells Nowitzki's career and life.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: On October 30, 2019, by a unanimous resolution of the Dallas City Council, part of Olive Street was renamed Nowitzki Way, which runs past the American Airlines Center. In December 2019, Nowitzki received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany from Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in recognition of his social commitment.


title: Dirk Nowitzki

text: On January 5, 2022, Nowitzki's number 41 was retired by the Mavericks. The same night, Mark Cuban unveiled the design for the statue of Nowitzki that is planned to be installed outside the arena.


title: Nicola Coughlan

text: Nicola Mary Coughlan (born 9 January 1987) is an Irish actress. She is known for her roles as Clare Devlin in the Channel 4 sitcom "Derry Girls" (2018–2022) and Penelope Featherington in the Netflix period drama "Bridgerton" (2020–present).


title: Nicola Coughlan

text: Coughlan was born on 9 January 1987 in Galway, Ireland, and grew up in Oranmore. At the age of five, when watching her older sister performing in a school play, she decided to become an actress. She attended Scoil Mhuire for primary school and Calasanctius College for secondary school. She graduated with a degree in English and Classical Civilisation from the National University of Ireland, Galway. She then went on to train in England at the Oxford School of Drama and Birmingham School of Acting. She lives in London.


title: Nicola Coughlan

text: At the age of 10, in 1997, Nicola Coughlan had an uncredited role in action thriller film "My Brother's War". In 2004, she started her career with a role in Tom Collins’ short film, "The Phantom Cnut", a revenge comedy. In the following years, she did various voice works in animated series. At some point, due to financial difficulties, Coughlan had to go back to Ireland. She was suffering from depression during this period and her family helped her through the entire process. She worked part-time at an optician in Galway. She responded to an open casting call for "Jess and Joe Forever" at The Old Vic in London and won the main role of Jess. The first performance was in September 2016 prior to a national tour.


title: Nicola Coughlan

text: In 2018, Coughlan began playing Clare Devlin, one of the main characters, in "Derry Girls". This sitcom is set in Derry, Northern Ireland, in the 1990s. The series was broadcast in January and February 2018 on Channel 4. But it was after its rerelease onto streaming platform Netflix in December of the same year that the show gained an international audience and an instant popularity.


title: Nicola Coughlan

text: In the same year, she also played Hannah Dalton in "Harlots". The period drama television series is set in 18th-century London. 2018 marked her West End debut in The Donmar Warehouse production of "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie". The "Evening Standard" named her "one of the Rising Stars of 2018". The same year, she competed against some of her "Derry Girls" co-stars in an episode of the show "The Great British Bake Off".


title: Nicola Coughlan

text: In 2019, it was announced that Coughlan had been cast in the Netflix series "Bridgerton", which premiered in December 2020. In this period-drama series based on the best-selling Julia Quinn book series of the same name, Coughlan plays Penelope Featherington, a reluctant debutante and youngest daughter of a nouveau-riche family in Regency-era London.


title: Nicola Coughlan

text: In 2018, while Coughlan was appearing on stage in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" at London's Donmar Warehouse, she wrote a piece for "the Guardian" calling out unfair scrutiny of women's bodies in theatre criticism. In the following year, she made headlines again for rebutting the "Daily Mirror"’s comment on her 2019 British Academy Television Awards look: "Not the most flattering". She tweeted "I mean incorrect @DailyMirror I look smokin’, sorry bout it". In July 2020, she auctioned off an Alex Perry dress and raised €5,000 towards the Laura Lynn Hospice, an Irish children's hospice which provides specialist palliative and supportive care services.


title: Nicola Coughlan

text: In February 2019, 28 women with their suitcases led by Nicola Coughlan crossed London's Westminster Bridge to demand the decriminalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland. They represented the estimated number of women a week who had to travel to England to access abortion.


title: Nicola Coughlan

text: On 26 June 2020, Coughlan and her fellow "Derry Girls" co-stars performed a sketch with Saoirse Ronan for the RTÉ fundraising special "RTÉ Does Comic Relief". The night's proceeds went to those affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: In European football, the UEFA coefficients are statistics based in weighted arithmetic means used for ranking and seeding teams in club and international competitions. Introduced in 1979 for men's football tournaments, and after applied in women's football and futsal, the coefficients are calculated by UEFA, who administer football within Europe, as well as Armenia, Israel and the Asian parts of some transcontinental countries.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The confederation publishes three types of rankings: one analysing a single season, one analysing a five-year span and another analysing a ten-year span. For men's competitions (discussed in this article), three sets of coefficients are calculated:


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The UEFA national team coefficient was first introduced in November 1997, and for the first time used for seeding the UEFA Euro 2000 qualification groups and UEFA Euro 2000 final tournament. The ranking system derived from the results of each European national football team, and was only calculated by UEFA every second year in November; defined as being the point of time when all UEFA nations had completed the qualification stage of the upcoming World Cup or European Championship tournament.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The purpose of calculating the coefficients was to compile an official UEFA rank, to be used as seeding criteria for the European nations, when drawing up qualification groups and the final tournament groups of the European Championship. Similar to how the FIFA World Rankings previously had been created and used as a seeding tool, when drawing up qualification groups and final tournament groups for the FIFA World Cup. The FIFA World Ranking has always been used for the seeded draw of UEFA qualification groups for the FIFA World Cup, since the 1998 qualification draw took place in December 1995; except for the qualifiers for 2002 and 2006, where UEFA instead opted to use the UEFA national team coefficient also as the ranking system for the seeded draw of FIFA World Cup qualification groups.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: Until the end of the Euro 2008 tournament, the UEFA national team coefficient was calculated by dividing the number of all points scored (three points for a win, one for a draw) by the number of all matches played, combined during the last two qualification rounds for the World Cup and European Championship. Results from the final tournaments, play-off matches and friendly games were all ignored. In those cases where a nation did not take part at one of the two latest qualifying rounds, due to being directly qualified as a host, only one qualifying round would be taken into account.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: If two or more nations ended up with exactly the same coefficient, the following ranking criteria were applied:


title: UEFA coefficient

text: On 20 May 2008, UEFA announced changes to the coefficient ranking system. The ranking will continue to be calculated every second year in November, but under the new system, teams now gain ranking points for each game played in the most recently completed full cycle (defined as all qualifying games and final tournament games) of both the World Cup and European Championship, with addition of ranking points for each game played at the latest completed half cycle (defined as all games played in the latest qualifying round). Ranking points for all games played inside those two and a half cycles, will be awarded according to the rules listed below.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The amount of awarded match points and bonus points (rule 1-4), later was slightly revised into the total amount of points available per match, as per the table below:


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The coefficients from 2017 used for the seeding and pot placements in the draw for 2018–19 UEFA Nations League, were calculated for each country based on their achieved results from UEFA or FIFA matches played in the period from 7 September 2012 to 10 October 2017, by applying the eight rules listed above and averaging:


title: UEFA coefficient

text: After the recalculation of the coefficient rankings for the 2007 cycle, Italy were ranked top following their FIFA World Cup victory in 2006. Runners-up France lay behind them in second place, followed by the Czech Republic. Spain overtook Italy to gain first place following their UEFA Euro 2008 win, with beaten finalists Germany moving into second; the Netherlands were third.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: Spain consolidated their top spot by winning the 2010 FIFA World Cup, with the Netherlands jumping above Germany by finishing second in the tournament. In the 2013 rankings, Spain maintained top spot by winning their third major competition in a row - UEFA Euro 2012. Germany regained second, with the Dutch falling back to third place after failing to make it out of their group.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: Germany climbed to the top of the 2015 rankings as a result of their 2014 FIFA World Cup success; Spain dropped behind them. England reached their highest position in the rankings - placed third. Germany held on to top spot in 2017, with new European champions Portugal in second; Belgium were third.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: UEFA decided after 2017, no longer to use the UEFA National Team Coefficient ranking system for seeding in UEFA competitions. The seeding of national teams will in the future instead be based on the overall ranking of the biennial UEFA Nations League for the draw of groups in the UEFA Euro qualification stage, the next edition of the Nations League, and the latter will subsequently be used for the seeded draw of groups in the UEFA Euro final tournament.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The association coefficient is used to rank the football associations of Europe, and thus determine the number of clubs from an association that will participate in the UEFA Champions League, the UEFA Europa League and the UEFA Europa Conference League.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The UEFA ranking determines the number of teams competing in the season after the next, not in the first season after the publication of the ranking. Thus, the rankings at the end of the 2021–22 season determine the team allocation by association in the 2023–24 (not 2022–23) UEFA season. This is unrelated to the selection of teams which will fill each allocation through the individual association leagues and national cups (which is decided in the preceding season).


title: UEFA coefficient

text: This coefficient is determined by the results of the clubs of the associations in the UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League and the UEFA Europa Conference League games over the past five seasons. Two points are awarded for each win by a club, and one for a draw (points are halved in the qualifying rounds). Results determined by extra time do count in determining the allocation of points, but results determined by penalty-shootouts do not affect the allocation of points, other than for bonus points given for qualification into the latter rounds. The number of points awarded each season is divided by the number of teams that participated for that association in that season. This number is then rounded down to three decimal places (e.g. would be rounded to 2.666).


title: UEFA coefficient

text: To determine an association's coefficient for a particular season, the coefficients for the last five seasons are added. Bonus points are added to the number of points scored in a season. Bonus points are allocated for:


title: UEFA coefficient

text: UEFA uses this coefficient system to decide which teams gain automatic entry to the group stage and which teams must go through qualifying. For instance, the teams who occupy the top four league places in the associations ranked 1 to 4 in UEFA competition, the top two teams of the association ranked 5 and 6, and the champions in the associations ranked 7 to 10 gain automatic entry into the group stages for the following season's Champions League competition.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The ranking below takes into account of each association's performance in European competitions from 2018–19 to 2022–23, with the 2022–23 season currently taking place.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The final ranking at the end of the 2022–23 season will be used to determine the minimum number of places for each association in the 2024–25 UEFA club competitions.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: According to the UEFA regulations a National League needs to consist of at least eight clubs to be considered valid, otherwise no participants of such a league will be allowed to enter European competitions.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, two-legged ties in the knockout stages of the 2019–20 UEFA Champions League and 2019–20 UEFA Europa League, and in the qualifying stages of the 2020–21 UEFA Champions League and 2020–21 UEFA Europa League, were changed to single-leg matches. In those cases where there is such format change, the following points will be awarded instead:


title: UEFA coefficient

text: This translates to the original system (2 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, 0 points for a loss) by considering the "unplayed leg" as a draw.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The following is the default access list since the 2021–22 season. Rankings in table exclude Liechtenstein.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: Following the introduction of the UEFA Cup in 1971, the competition began to grow in complexity having more clubs than the European Champions Cup and the Cup Winners' Cup, reaching up to four from a single country. UEFA began to publish rankings in 1979, to identify the number of participants for each association in the UEFA Cup.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: Subsequently, for statistical purposes, various rankings were introduced to portray the history of the associations. According to the prorated (extended) calculation system, only four associations have succeeded in being ranked as the top European association.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: Following the Heysel Stadium disaster, all English teams were banned from UEFA competitions in 1985. The ban was only lifted after five seasons, with the knock-on effects continuing to impact on English football for a total of nine years from 1986 to 1994. Having been top in 1985, England were un-ranked in 1990 and would not regain the top position until 2008.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The following data indicates the three top-ranked associations in each five-year period. Data prior to 1975–1979 period has been calculated, but precedes the first published by the Confederation and has merely informative value. Note that the table take into account the results from the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, which was a non-UEFA competition that took place until 1971, whose teams in the first editions were representing cities instead of clubs.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The ranking below takes into account of each association's performance in European competitions from 2018–19 to 2022–23, with the 2022–23 season to start on 18 August 2022.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The final ranking at the end of the 2022–23 season will be used to determine the number of places for each association in the 2024–25 UEFA Women's Champions League.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The table shows the ranking of nations with respect to the total number of years in the top three of the rankings:


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The club coefficient is either the sum of the points earned by the club in the UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League and UEFA Europa Conference League over the previous five seasons or 20% of the club's association coefficient over the same period, whichever coefficient is higher. This ranking is used by UEFA to determine a club's seeding in club competition draws, including the qualifying and group stages of the UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League and the UEFA Europa Conference League.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The clubs receive two points for a win, one point for a draw, and no points for a defeat in games of the main stages of the Champions League, Europa League and Europa Conference League. Results determined after extra-time are included in this method, however results determined after penalty shoot-outs are not (the result is considered a draw). Bonus points for entering the Europa League group stage or Europa Conference League group stage are not additional to win/draw points; they provide a minimum points allowance for participating clubs, whereas bonus points for entering the Champions League group stage (and those for qualifying to the knockout stage) are additional to win/draw points.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: Qualifying round results are only taken into account if the club is eliminated in one of the rounds (see table below). Otherwise, the qualifying round results are taken into account only for the calculation of the association's coefficient and are halved. The clubs do not receive any points for elimination in the Champions League or Europa League qualifying because those clubs move to the Europa League and/or Europa Conference League and receive points from participation in that competition.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The ranking below takes into account of each club's performance in European competitions from 2018–19 to 2022–23, with the 2022–23 season currently taking place.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: Prior to the 2018 club rankings, teams received the sum of their points earned over the last five seasons "plus" 20% of the club's association coefficient.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: Before 1999 a number of strong teams in the UEFA Cup were seeded such that those teams did not meet in the first two rounds. To determine these teams, the sum of the ratio of the number of points achieved to the number of games played by each team, was calculated for the past five seasons.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The following data indicate the top-ranked clubs in each 5-year period. Data prior to 1975–1979 period has been calculated, but precedes the first published by the Confederation and has merely informative value.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: Top-rated clubs listed by number of times they were top-ranked over a 5-year period since the first period officially analysed (1975–1979):


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The season coefficient of a club is calculated by adding the total number of points it obtains in a given season and 20% of its association's coefficient for that same season. A club's five-season coefficient is the cumulative total of its five season coefficients from the reference period and 20% of its association's five-season association's coefficient. This ranking is used by UEFA to determine a club's seeding in club competition draws, including the qualifying and group stages of the UEFA Women's Champions League.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The ranking below takes into account of each team's performance in European competitions from 2018–19 to 2022–23, with the 2022–23 season starting 18 August 2022.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: Top-rated women's clubs listed by number of times they were top-ranked over a 5-year period since the first period officially analysed (2001–2005):


title: UEFA coefficient

text: UEFA calculates coefficients for each association that takes part in the UEFA Regions' Cup. These coefficients are calculated to compile ranking lists that are used to determine the round in which each team enters the competition and to seed the teams for the draws. The coefficient ranking list is established for the preliminary and intermediate round draws on the basis of the associations’ results in the three most recent completed seasons at the time of the draws. For the 2022–23 competition, the coefficient ranking list is therefore based on the associations' results in the seasons 2014–15, 2016–17 and 2018–19.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: Points are awarded for each match played in the qualifying competition. Match points are awarded in accordance with the final scores as ratified by UEFA. Final tournament matches and penalty shoot-outs are not taken into consideration. In addition to the match points, the bonus points are awarded for each season.The points are given as follows:


title: UEFA coefficient

text: Since 2020 FIFA Futsal World Cup qualification, coefficients are based on the Elo rating system and are constantly updated to all non-friendly matches. This ranking is used to seed national teams on UEFA competitions and to decide the number of clubs from an association that will participate in the UEFA Futsal Champions League.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The coefficients from 2020 used for the seeding and pot placements in the draw for UEFA Women's Futsal Euro 2022, were based on results on 2019 edition.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The club coefficient, used to determine seeds and entrance round on the UEFA Futsal Champions League, is the sum of the points earned by the club in that competition on the previous three seasons and 50% of the club's association coefficient over the same period. The association coefficient is the sum of the points earned by all the clubs of the association. Even though all calculation procedures are public for association and club coefficients, UEFA only publishes the coefficients of the clubs competing in the next season of UEFA Futsal Champions League.


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The coefficients for the top 16 teams competing on 2022–23 UEFA Futsal Champions League are as follows:


title: UEFA coefficient

text: The UEFA coefficient system has been criticised for being likely to preserve the status quo for rankings and seedings, as well as for favouring teams from stronger leagues.


title: Life

text: Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from that which does not, and is defined by the capacity for growth, reaction to stimuli, metabolism, energy transformation, and reproduction. Various forms of life exist, such as plants, animals, fungi, protists, archaea, and bacteria. Biology is the science that studies life.


title: Life

text: The gene is the unit of heredity, whereas the cell is the structural and functional unit of life. There are two kinds of cells, prokaryotic and eukaryotic, both of which consist of cytoplasm enclosed within a membrane and contain many biomolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. Cells reproduce through a process of cell division, in which the parent cell divides into two or more daughter cells and passes its genes onto a new generation, sometimes producing genetic variation.


title: Life

text: Organisms, or the individual entities of life, are generally thought to be open systems that maintain homeostasis, are composed of cells, have a life cycle, undergo metabolism, can grow, adapt to their environment, respond to stimuli, reproduce and evolve over multiple generations. Other definitions sometimes include non-cellular life forms such as viruses and viroids, but they are usually excluded because they do not function on their own; rather, they exploit the biological processes of hosts.


title: Life

text: Abiogenesis, also known as the Origin of Life, is the natural process of life arising from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds. Since its primordial beginnings, life on Earth has changed its environment on a geologic time scale, but it has also adapted to survive in most ecosystems and conditions. New lifeforms have evolved from common ancestors through hereditary variation and natural selection, and today, estimates of the number of distinct species range anywhere from 3 million to over 100 million.


title: Life

text: Death is the permanent termination of all biological processes which sustain an organism, and as such, is the end of its life. Extinction is the term describing the dying-out of a group or taxon, usually a species. Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of organisms.


title: Life

text: The definition of life has long been a challenge for scientists and philosophers. This is partially because life is a process, not a substance. This is complicated by a lack of knowledge of the characteristics of living entities, if any, that may have developed outside of Earth. Philosophical definitions of life have also been put forward, with similar difficulties on how to distinguish living things from the non-living. Legal definitions of life have also been described and debated, though these generally focus on the decision to declare a human dead, and the legal ramifications of this decision. As many as 123 definitions of life have been compiled. One definition seems to be favoured by NASA: "a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution". More simply, life is "matter that can reproduce itself and evolve as survival dictates".


title: Life

text: Since there is no unequivocal definition of life, most current definitions in biology are descriptive. Life is considered a characteristic of something that preserves, furthers or reinforces its existence in the given environment. This characteristic exhibits all or most of the following traits:


title: Life

text: These complex processes, called physiological functions, have underlying physical and chemical bases, as well as signaling and control mechanisms that are essential to maintaining life.


title: Life

text: From a physics perspective, living beings are thermodynamic systems with an organised molecular structure that can reproduce itself and evolve as survival dictates. Thermodynamically, life has been described as an open system which makes use of gradients in its surroundings to create imperfect copies of itself. Another way of putting this is to define life as "a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution", a definition adopted by a NASA committee attempting to define life for the purposes of exobiology, based on a suggestion by Carl Sagan. A major strength of this definition is that it distinguishes life by the evolutionary process rather than its chemical composition.


title: Life

text: Others take a systemic viewpoint that does not necessarily depend on molecular chemistry. One systemic definition of life is that living things are self-organizing and autopoietic (self-producing). Variations of this definition include Stuart Kauffman's definition as an autonomous agent or a multi-agent system capable of reproducing itself or themselves, and of completing at least one thermodynamic work cycle. This definition is extended by the apparition of novel functions over time.


title: Life

text: Whether or not viruses should be considered as alive is controversial. They are most often considered as just gene coding replicators rather than forms of life. They have been described as "organisms at the edge of life" because they possess genes, evolve by natural selection, and replicate by making multiple copies of themselves through self-assembly. However, viruses do not metabolise and they require a host cell to make new products. Virus self-assembly within host cells has implications for the study of the origin of life, as it may support the hypothesis that life could have started as self-assembling organic molecules.


title: Life

text: To reflect the minimum phenomena required, other biological definitions of life have been proposed, with many of these being based upon chemical systems. Biophysicists have commented that living things function on negative entropy. In other words, living processes can be viewed as a delay of the spontaneous diffusion or dispersion of the internal energy of biological molecules towards more potential microstates. In more detail, according to physicists such as John Bernal, Erwin Schrödinger, Eugene Wigner, and John Avery, life is a member of the class of phenomena that are open or continuous systems able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances or free energy taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form. The emergence and increasing popularity of biomimetics or biomimicry (the design and production of materials, structures, and systems that are modelled on biological entities and processes) will likely redefine the boundary between natural and artificial life.


title: Life

text: Living systems are open self-organizing living things that interact with their environment. These systems are maintained by flows of information, energy, and matter.


title: Life

text: Budisa, Kubyshkin and Schmidt defined cellular life as an organizational unit resting on four pillars/cornerstones: (i) energy, (ii) metabolism, (iii) information and (iv) form. This system is able to regulate and control metabolism and energy supply and contains at least one subsystem that functions as an information carrier (genetic information). Cells as self-sustaining units are parts of different populations that are involved in the unidirectional and irreversible open-ended process known as evolution.


title: Life

text: Some scientists have proposed in the last few decades that a general living systems theory is required to explain the nature of life. Such a general theory would arise out of the ecological and biological sciences and attempt to map general principles for how all living systems work. Instead of examining phenomena by attempting to break things down into components, a general living systems theory explores phenomena in terms of dynamic patterns of the relationships of organisms with their environment.


title: Life

text: The idea that Earth is alive is found in philosophy and religion, but the first scientific discussion of it was by the Scottish scientist James Hutton. In 1785, he stated that Earth was a superorganism and that its proper study should be physiology. Hutton is considered the father of geology, but his idea of a living Earth was forgotten in the intense reductionism of the 19th century. The Gaia hypothesis, proposed in the 1960s by scientist James Lovelock, suggests that life on Earth functions as a single organism that defines and maintains environmental conditions necessary for its survival. This hypothesis served as one of the foundations of the modern Earth system science.


title: Life

text: Robert Rosen devoted a large part of his career, from 1958 onwards, to developing a comprehensive theory of life as a self-organizing complex system, "closed to efficient causation". He defined a system component as "a unit of organization; a part with a function, i.e., a definite relation between part and whole." He identified the "nonfractionability of components in an organism" as the fundamental difference between living systems and "biological machines." He summarised his views in his book "Life Itself". Similar ideas may be found in the book "Living Systems" by James Grier Miller.


title: Life

text: A systems view of life treats environmental fluxes and biological fluxes together as a "reciprocity of influence," and a reciprocal relation with environment is arguably as important for understanding life as it is for understanding ecosystems. As Harold J. Morowitz (1992) explains it, life is a property of an ecological system rather than a single organism or species. He argues that an ecosystemic definition of life is preferable to a strictly biochemical or physical one. Robert Ulanowicz (2009) highlights mutualism as the key to understand the systemic, order-generating behaviour of life and ecosystems.


title: Life

text: Complex systems biology (CSB) is a field of science that studies the emergence of complexity in functional organisms from the viewpoint of dynamic systems theory. The latter is also often called systems biology and aims to understand the most fundamental aspects of life. A closely related approach to CSB and systems biology called relational biology is concerned mainly with understanding life processes in terms of the most important relations, and categories of such relations among the essential functional components of organisms; for multicellular organisms, this has been defined as "categorical biology", or a model representation of organisms as a category theory of biological relations, as well as an algebraic topology of the functional organisation of living organisms in terms of their dynamic, complex networks of metabolic, genetic, and epigenetic processes and signalling pathways. Alternative but closely related approaches focus on the interdependence of constraints, where constraints can be either molecular, such as enzymes, or macroscopic, such as the geometry of a bone or of the vascular system.


title: Life

text: It has also been argued that the evolution of order in living systems and certain physical systems obeys a common fundamental principle termed the Darwinian dynamic. The Darwinian dynamic was formulated by first considering how macroscopic order is generated in a simple non-biological system far from thermodynamic equilibrium, and then extending consideration to short, replicating RNA molecules. The underlying order-generating process was concluded to be basically similar for both types of systems.


title: Life

text: Another systemic definition called the operator theory proposes that life is a general term for the presence of the typical closures found in organisms; the typical closures are a membrane and an autocatalytic set in the cell and that an organism is any system with an organisation that complies with an operator type that is at least as complex as the cell. Life can also be modelled as a network of inferior negative feedbacks of regulatory mechanisms subordinated to a superior positive feedback formed by the potential of expansion and reproduction.


title: Life

text: Some of the earliest theories of life were materialist, holding that all that exists is matter, and that life is merely a complex form or arrangement of matter. Empedocles (430 BC) argued that everything in the universe is made up of a combination of four eternal "elements" or "roots of all": earth, water, air, and fire. All change is explained by the arrangement and rearrangement of these four elements. The various forms of life are caused by an appropriate mixture of elements.


title: Life

text: Democritus (460 BC) thought that the essential characteristic of life is having a soul ("psyche"). Like other ancient writers, he was attempting to explain what makes something a "living" thing. His explanation was that fiery atoms make a soul in exactly the same way atoms and void account for any other thing. He elaborates on fire because of the apparent connection between life and heat, and because fire moves.


title: Life

text: The mechanistic materialism that originated in ancient Greece was revived and revised by the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), who held that animals and humans were assemblages of parts that together functioned as a machine. This idea was developed further by Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1750) in his book "L'Homme Machine".


title: Life

text: In the 19th century, the advances in cell theory in biological science encouraged this view. The evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin (1859) is a mechanistic explanation for the origin of species by means of natural selection.


title: Life

text: At the beginning of the 20th century Stéphane Leduc (1853–1939) promoted the idea that biological processes could be understood in terms of physics and chemistry, and that their growth resembled that of inorganic crystals immersed in solutions of sodium silicate. His ideas, set out in his book "La biologie synthétique" was widely dismissed during his lifetime, but has incurred a resurgence of interest in the work of Russell, Barge and colleagues.


title: Life

text: Hylomorphism is a theory first expressed by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (322 BC). The application of hylomorphism to biology was important to Aristotle, and biology is extensively covered in his extant writings. In this view, everything in the material universe has both matter and form, and the form of a living thing is its soul (Greek "psyche", Latin "anima"). There are three kinds of souls: the "vegetative soul" of plants, which causes them to grow and decay and nourish themselves, but does not cause motion and sensation; the "animal soul", which causes animals to move and feel; and the "rational soul", which is the source of consciousness and reasoning, which (Aristotle believed) is found only in man. Each higher soul has all of the attributes of the lower ones. Aristotle believed that while matter can exist without form, form cannot exist without matter, and that therefore the soul cannot exist without the body.


title: Life

text: This account is consistent with teleological explanations of life, which account for phenomena in terms of purpose or goal-directedness. Thus, the whiteness of the polar bear's coat is explained by its purpose of camouflage. The direction of causality (from the future to the past) is in contradiction with the scientific evidence for natural selection, which explains the consequence in terms of a prior cause. Biological features are explained not by looking at future optimal results, but by looking at the past evolutionary history of a species, which led to the natural selection of the features in question.


title: Life

text: Spontaneous generation was the belief that living organisms can form without descent from similar organisms. Typically, the idea was that certain forms such as fleas could arise from inanimate matter such as dust or the supposed seasonal generation of mice and insects from mud or garbage.


title: Life

text: The theory of spontaneous generation was proposed by Aristotle, who compiled and expanded the work of prior natural philosophers and the various ancient explanations of the appearance of organisms; it was considered the best explanation for two millennia. It was decisively dispelled by the experiments of Louis Pasteur in 1859, who expanded upon the investigations of predecessors such as Francesco Redi. Disproof of the traditional ideas of spontaneous generation is no longer controversial among biologists.


title: Life

text: Vitalism is the belief that the life-principle is non-material. This originated with Georg Ernst Stahl (17th century), and remained popular until the middle of the 19th century. It appealed to philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Wilhelm Dilthey, anatomists like Xavier Bichat, and chemists like Justus von Liebig. Vitalism included the idea that there was a fundamental difference between organic and inorganic material, and the belief that organic material can only be derived from living things. This was disproved in 1828, when Friedrich Wöhler prepared urea from inorganic materials. This Wöhler synthesis is considered the starting point of modern organic chemistry. It is of historical significance because for the first time an organic compound was produced in inorganic reactions.


title: Life

text: During the 1850s, Hermann von Helmholtz, anticipated by Julius Robert von Mayer, demonstrated that no energy is lost in muscle movement, suggesting that there were no "vital forces" necessary to move a muscle. These results led to the abandonment of scientific interest in vitalistic theories, especially after Buchner's demonstration that alcoholic fermentation could occur in cell-free extracts of yeast.


title: Life

text: Nonetheless, the belief still exists in pseudoscientific theories such as homoeopathy, which interprets diseases and sickness as caused by disturbances in a hypothetical vital force or life force.


title: Life

text: The age of Earth is about 4.54 billion years. Evidence suggests that life on Earth has existed for at least 3.5 billion years, with the oldest physical traces of life dating back 3.7 billion years; however, some hypotheses, such as Late Heavy Bombardment, suggest that life on Earth may have started even earlier, as early as 4.1–4.4 billion years ago, and the chemistry leading to life may have begun shortly after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, during an epoch when the universe was only 10–17 million years old.


title: Life

text: More than 99% of all species of life forms, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct.


title: Life

text: Although the number of Earth's catalogued species of lifeforms is between 1.2 million and 2 million, the total number of species in the planet is uncertain. Estimates range from 8 million to 100 million, with a more narrow range between 10 and 14 million, but it may be as high as 1 trillion (with only one-thousandth of one per cent of the species described) according to studies realised in May 2016. The total number of related DNA base pairs on Earth is estimated at 5.0 x 10 and weighs 50 billion tonnes. In comparison, the total mass of the biosphere has been estimated to be as much as 4 TtC (trillion tons of carbon). In July 2016, scientists reported identifying a set of 355 genes from the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) of all organisms living on Earth.


title: Life

text: All known life forms share fundamental molecular mechanisms, reflecting their common descent; based on these observations, hypotheses on the origin of life attempt to find a mechanism explaining the formation of a universal common ancestor, from simple organic molecules via pre-cellular life to protocells and metabolism. Models have been divided into "genes-first" and "metabolism-first" categories, but a recent trend is the emergence of hybrid models that combine both categories.


title: Life

text: There is no current scientific consensus as to how life originated. However, most accepted scientific models build on the Miller–Urey experiment and the work of Sidney Fox, which show that conditions on the primitive Earth favoured chemical reactions that synthesize amino acids and other organic compounds from inorganic precursors, and phospholipids spontaneously form lipid bilayers, the basic structure of a cell membrane.


title: Life

text: Living organisms synthesize proteins, which are polymers of amino acids using instructions encoded by deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Protein synthesis entails intermediary ribonucleic acid (RNA) polymers. One possibility for how life began is that genes originated first, followed by proteins; the alternative being that proteins came first and then genes.


title: Life

text: However, because genes and proteins are both required to produce the other, the problem of considering which came first is like that of the chicken or the egg. Most scientists have adopted the hypothesis that because of this, it is unlikely that genes and proteins arose independently.


title: Life

text: Therefore, a possibility, first suggested by Francis Crick, is that the first life was based on RNA, which has the DNA-like properties of information storage and the catalytic properties of some proteins. This is called the RNA world hypothesis, and it is supported by the observation that many of the most critical components of cells (those that evolve the slowest) are composed mostly or entirely of RNA. Also, many critical cofactors (ATP, Acetyl-CoA, NADH, etc.) are either nucleotides or substances clearly related to them. The catalytic properties of RNA had not yet been demonstrated when the hypothesis was first proposed, but they were confirmed by Thomas Cech in 1986.


title: Life

text: One issue with the RNA world hypothesis is that synthesis of RNA from simple inorganic precursors is more difficult than for other organic molecules. One reason for this is that RNA precursors are very stable and react with each other very slowly under ambient conditions, and it has also been proposed that living organisms consisted of other molecules before RNA. However, the successful synthesis of certain RNA molecules under the conditions that existed prior to life on Earth has been achieved by adding alternative precursors in a specified order with the precursor phosphate present throughout the reaction. This study makes the RNA world hypothesis more plausible.


title: Life

text: Geological findings in 2013 showed that reactive phosphorus species (like phosphite) were in abundance in the ocean before 3.5 Ga, and that Schreibersite easily reacts with aqueous glycerol to generate phosphite and glycerol 3-phosphate. It is hypothesized that Schreibersite-containing meteorites from the Late Heavy Bombardment could have provided early reduced phosphorus, which could react with prebiotic organic molecules to form phosphorylated biomolecules, like RNA.


title: Life

text: In 2009, experiments demonstrated Darwinian evolution of a two-component system of RNA enzymes (ribozymes) "in vitro". The work was performed in the laboratory of Gerald Joyce, who stated "This is the first example, outside of biology, of evolutionary adaptation in a molecular genetic system."


title: Life

text: Prebiotic compounds may have originated extraterrestrially. NASA findings in 2011, based on studies with meteorites found on Earth, suggest DNA and RNA components (adenine, guanine and related organic molecules) may be formed in outer space.


title: Life

text: In March 2015, NASA scientists reported that, for the first time, complex DNA and RNA organic compounds of life, including uracil, cytosine and thymine, have been formed in the laboratory under outer space conditions, using starting chemicals, such as pyrimidine, found in meteorites. Pyrimidine, like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), the most carbon-rich chemical found in the universe, may have been formed in red giants or in interstellar dust and gas clouds, according to the scientists.


title: Life

text: According to the panspermia hypothesis, microscopic life—distributed by meteoroids, asteroids and other small Solar System bodies—may exist throughout the universe.


title: Life

text: The diversity of life on Earth is a result of the dynamic interplay between genetic opportunity, metabolic capability, environmental challenges, and symbiosis. For most of its existence, Earth's habitable environment has been dominated by microorganisms and subjected to their metabolism and evolution. As a consequence of these microbial activities, the physical-chemical environment on Earth has been changing on a geologic time scale, thereby affecting the path of evolution of subsequent life. For example, the release of molecular oxygen by cyanobacteria as a by-product of photosynthesis induced global changes in the Earth's environment. Because oxygen was toxic to most life on Earth at the time, this posed novel evolutionary challenges, and ultimately resulted in the formation of Earth's major animal and plant species. This interplay between organisms and their environment is an inherent feature of living systems.


title: Life

text: The biosphere is the global sum of all ecosystems. It can also be termed as the zone of life on Earth, a closed system (apart from solar and cosmic radiation and heat from the interior of the Earth), and largely self-regulating. By the most general biophysiological definition, the biosphere is the global ecological system integrating all living beings and their relationships, including their interaction with the elements of the lithosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere.


title: Life

text: Life forms live in every part of the Earth's biosphere, including soil, hot springs, inside rocks at least deep underground, the deepest parts of the ocean, and at least high in the atmosphere. Under certain test conditions, life forms have been observed to thrive in the near-weightlessness of space and to survive in the vacuum of outer space. Life forms appear to thrive in the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot in the Earth's oceans. Other researchers reported related studies that life forms thrive inside rocks up to below the sea floor under of ocean off the coast of the northwestern United States, as well as beneath the seabed off Japan. In August 2014, scientists confirmed the existence of life forms living below the ice of Antarctica. According to one researcher, "You can find microbes everywhere—they're extremely adaptable to conditions, and survive wherever they are."


title: Life

text: The biosphere is postulated to have evolved, beginning with a process of biopoesis (life created naturally from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds) or biogenesis (life created from living matter), at least some 3.5 billion years ago. The earliest evidence for life on Earth includes biogenic graphite found in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks from Western Greenland and microbial mat fossils found in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone from Western Australia. More recently, in 2015, "remains of biotic life" were found in 4.1 billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia. In 2017, putative fossilised microorganisms (or microfossils) were announced to have been discovered in hydrothermal vent precipitates in the Nuvvuagittuq Belt of Quebec, Canada that were as old as 4.28 billion years, the oldest record of life on Earth, suggesting "an almost instantaneous emergence of life" after ocean formation 4.4 billion years ago, and not long after the formation of the Earth 4.54 billion years ago. According to biologist Stephen Blair Hedges, "If life arose relatively quickly on Earth ... then it could be common in the universe."


title: Life

text: In a general sense, biospheres are any closed, self-regulating systems containing ecosystems. This includes artificial biospheres such as Biosphere 2 and BIOS-3, and potentially ones on other planets or moons.


title: Life

text: The inert components of an ecosystem are the physical and chemical factors necessary for life—energy (sunlight or chemical energy), water, heat, atmosphere, gravity, nutrients, and ultraviolet solar radiation protection. In most ecosystems, the conditions vary during the day and from one season to the next. To live in most ecosystems, then, organisms must be able to survive a range of conditions, called the "range of tolerance." Outside that are the "zones of physiological stress," where the survival and reproduction are possible but not optimal. Beyond these zones are the "zones of intolerance," where survival and reproduction of that organism is unlikely or impossible. Organisms that have a wide range of tolerance are more widely distributed than organisms with a narrow range of tolerance.


title: Life

text: To survive, selected microorganisms can assume forms that enable them to withstand freezing, complete desiccation, starvation, high levels of radiation exposure, and other physical or chemical challenges. These microorganisms may survive exposure to such conditions for weeks, months, years, or even centuries. Extremophiles are microbial life forms that thrive outside the ranges where life is commonly found. They excel at exploiting uncommon sources of energy. While all organisms are composed of nearly identical molecules, evolution has enabled such microbes to cope with this wide range of physical and chemical conditions. Characterization of the structure and metabolic diversity of microbial communities in such extreme environments is ongoing.


title: Life

text: Microbial life forms thrive even in the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot in the Earth's oceans. Microbes also thrive inside rocks up to below the sea floor under of ocean. Expeditions of the International Ocean Discovery Program found unicellular life in 120 °C sediment that is 1.2 km below seafloor in the Nankai Trough subduction zone.


title: Life

text: Investigation of the tenacity and versatility of life on Earth, as well as an understanding of the molecular systems that some organisms utilise to survive such extremes, is important for the search for life beyond Earth. For example, lichen could survive for a month in a simulated Martian environment.


title: Life

text: All life forms require certain core chemical elements needed for biochemical functioning. These include carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur—the elemental macronutrients for all organisms—often represented by the acronym CHNOPS. Together these make up nucleic acids, proteins and lipids, the bulk of living matter. Five of these six elements comprise the chemical components of DNA, the exception being sulfur. The latter is a component of the amino acids cysteine and methionine. The most biologically abundant of these elements is carbon, which has the desirable attribute of forming multiple, stable covalent bonds. This allows carbon-based (organic) molecules to form an immense variety of chemical arrangements. Alternative hypothetical types of biochemistry have been proposed that eliminate one or more of these elements, swap out an element for one not on the list, or change required chiralities or other chemical properties.


title: Life

text: Deoxyribonucleic acid is a molecule that carries most of the genetic instructions used in the growth, development, functioning and reproduction of all known living organisms and many viruses. DNA and RNA are nucleic acids; alongside proteins and complex carbohydrates, they are one of the three major types of macromolecule that are essential for all known forms of life. Most DNA molecules consist of two biopolymer strands coiled around each other to form a double helix. The two DNA strands are known as polynucleotides since they are composed of simpler units called nucleotides. Each nucleotide is composed of a nitrogen-containing nucleobase—either cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), or thymine (T)—as well as a sugar called deoxyribose and a phosphate group. The nucleotides are joined to one another in a chain by covalent bonds between the sugar of one nucleotide and the phosphate of the next, resulting in an alternating sugar-phosphate backbone. According to base pairing rules (A with T, and C with G), hydrogen bonds bind the nitrogenous bases of the two separate polynucleotide strands to make double-stranded DNA. The total amount of related DNA base pairs on Earth is estimated at 5.0 x 10, and weighs 50 billion tonnes. In comparison, the total mass of the biosphere has been estimated to be as much as 4 TtC (trillion tons of carbon).


title: Life

text: DNA stores biological information. The DNA backbone is resistant to cleavage, and both strands of the double-stranded structure store the same biological information. Biological information is replicated as the two strands are separated. A significant portion of DNA (more than 98% for humans) is non-coding, meaning that these sections do not serve as patterns for protein sequences.


title: Life

text: The two strands of DNA run in opposite directions to each other and are, therefore, anti-parallel. Attached to each sugar is one of four types of nucleobases (informally, "bases"). It is the sequence of these four nucleobases along the backbone that encodes biological information. Under the genetic code, RNA strands are translated to specify the sequence of amino acids within proteins. These RNA strands are initially created using DNA strands as a template in a process called transcription.


title: Life

text: Within cells, DNA is organised into long structures called chromosomes. During cell division these chromosomes are duplicated in the process of DNA replication, providing each cell its own complete set of chromosomes. Eukaryotic organisms (animals, plants, fungi, and protists) store most of their DNA inside the cell nucleus and some of their DNA in organelles, such as mitochondria or chloroplasts. In contrast, prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) store their DNA only in the cytoplasm. Within the chromosomes, chromatin proteins such as histones compact and organise DNA. These compact structures guide the interactions between DNA and other proteins, helping control which parts of the DNA are transcribed.


title: Life

text: DNA was first isolated by Friedrich Miescher in 1869. Its molecular structure was identified by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, whose model-building efforts were guided by X-ray diffraction data acquired by Rosalind Franklin.


title: Life

text: The first known attempt to classify organisms was conducted by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC), who classified all living organisms known at that time as either a plant or an animal, based mainly on their ability to move. He also distinguished animals with blood from animals without blood (or at least without red blood), which can be compared with the concepts of vertebrates and invertebrates respectively, and divided the blooded animals into five groups: viviparous quadrupeds (mammals), oviparous quadrupeds (reptiles and amphibians), birds, fishes and whales. The bloodless animals were also divided into five groups: cephalopods, crustaceans, insects (which included the spiders, scorpions, and centipedes, in addition to what we define as insects today), shelled animals (such as most molluscs and echinoderms), and "zoophytes" (animals that resemble plants). Though Aristotle's work in zoology was not without errors, it was the grandest biological synthesis of the time and remained the ultimate authority for many centuries after his death.


title: Life

text: The exploration of the Americas revealed large numbers of new plants and animals that needed descriptions and classification. In the latter part of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th, careful study of animals commenced and was gradually extended until it formed a sufficient body of knowledge to serve as an anatomical basis for classification.


title: Life

text: In the late 1740s, Carl Linnaeus introduced his system of binomial nomenclature for the classification of species. Linnaeus attempted to improve the composition and reduce the length of the previously used many-worded names by abolishing unnecessary rhetoric, introducing new descriptive terms and precisely defining their meaning. The Linnaean classification has eight levels: domains, kingdoms, phyla, class, order, family, genus, and species.


title: Life

text: The fungi were originally treated as plants. For a short period Linnaeus had classified them in the taxon Vermes in Animalia, but later placed them back in Plantae. Copeland classified the Fungi in his Protoctista, thus partially avoiding the problem but acknowledging their special status. The problem was eventually solved by Whittaker, when he gave them their own kingdom in his five-kingdom system. Evolutionary history shows that the fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants.


title: Life

text: As new discoveries enabled detailed study of cells and microorganisms, new groups of life were revealed, and the fields of cell biology and microbiology were created. These new organisms were originally described separately in protozoa as animals and protophyta/thallophyta as plants, but were united by Haeckel in the kingdom Protista; later, the prokaryotes were split off in the kingdom Monera, which would eventually be divided into two separate groups, the Bacteria and the Archaea. This led to the six-kingdom system and eventually to the current three-domain system, which is based on evolutionary relationships. However, the classification of eukaryotes, especially of protists, is still controversial.


title: Life

text: As microbiology, molecular biology and virology developed, non-cellular reproducing agents were discovered, such as viruses and viroids. Whether these are considered alive has been a matter of debate; viruses lack characteristics of life such as cell membranes, metabolism and the ability to grow or respond to their environments. Viruses can still be classed into "species" based on their biology and genetics, but many aspects of such a classification remain controversial.


title: Life

text: In May 2016, scientists reported that 1 trillion species are estimated to be on Earth currently with only one-thousandth of one per cent described.


title: Life

text: In the 1960s cladistics emerged: a system arranging taxa based on clades in an evolutionary or phylogenetic tree.


title: Life

text: Cells are the basic unit of structure in every living thing, and all cells arise from pre-existing cells by division. Cell theory was formulated by Henri Dutrochet, Theodor Schwann, Rudolf Virchow and others during the early nineteenth century, and subsequently became widely accepted. The activity of an organism depends on the total activity of its cells, with energy flow occurring within and between them. Cells contain hereditary information that is carried forward as a genetic code during cell division.


title: Life

text: There are two primary types of cells. Prokaryotes lack a nucleus and other membrane-bound organelles, although they have circular DNA and ribosomes. Bacteria and Archaea are two domains of prokaryotes. The other primary type of cells are the eukaryotes, which have distinct nuclei bound by a nuclear membrane and membrane-bound organelles, including mitochondria, chloroplasts, lysosomes, rough and smooth endoplasmic reticulum, and vacuoles. In addition, they possess organised chromosomes that store genetic material. All species of large complex organisms are eukaryotes, including animals, plants and fungi, though most species of eukaryote are protist microorganisms. The conventional model is that eukaryotes evolved from prokaryotes, with the main organelles of the eukaryotes forming through endosymbiosis between bacteria and the progenitor eukaryotic cell.


title: Life

text: The molecular mechanisms of cell biology are based on proteins. Most of these are synthesised by the ribosomes through an enzyme-catalyzed process called protein biosynthesis. A sequence of amino acids is assembled and joined based upon gene expression of the cell's nucleic acid. In eukaryotic cells, these proteins may then be transported and processed through the Golgi apparatus in preparation for dispatch to their destination.


title: Life

text: Cells reproduce through a process of cell division in which the parent cell divides into two or more daughter cells. For prokaryotes, cell division occurs through a process of fission in which the DNA is replicated, then the two copies are attached to parts of the cell membrane. In eukaryotes, a more complex process of mitosis is followed. However, the result is the same; the resulting cell copies are identical to each other and to the original cell (except for mutations), and both are capable of further division following an interphase period.


title: Life

text: Multicellular organisms may have first evolved through the formation of colonies of identical cells. These cells can form group organisms through cell adhesion. The individual members of a colony are capable of surviving on their own, whereas the members of a true multi-cellular organism have developed specialisations, making them dependent on the remainder of the organism for survival. Such organisms are formed clonally or from a single germ cell that is capable of forming the various specialised cells that form the adult organism. This specialisation allows multicellular organisms to exploit resources more efficiently than single cells. In January 2016, scientists reported that, about 800 million years ago, a minor genetic change in a single molecule, called GK-PID, may have allowed organisms to go from a single cell organism to one of many cells.


title: Life

text: Cells have evolved methods to perceive and respond to their microenvironment, thereby enhancing their adaptability. Cell signalling coordinates cellular activities, and hence governs the basic functions of multicellular organisms. Signaling between cells can occur through direct cell contact using juxtacrine signalling, or indirectly through the exchange of agents as in the endocrine system. In more complex organisms, coordination of activities can occur through a dedicated nervous system.


title: Life

text: Though life is confirmed only on Earth, many think that extraterrestrial life is not only plausible, but probable or inevitable. Other planets and moons in the Solar System and other planetary systems are being examined for evidence of having once supported simple life, and projects such as SETI are trying to detect radio transmissions from possible alien civilisations. Other locations within the Solar System that may host microbial life include the subsurface of Mars, the upper atmosphere of Venus, and subsurface oceans on some of the moons of the giant planets.


title: Life

text: Beyond the Solar System, the region around another main-sequence star that could support Earth-like life on an Earth-like planet is known as the habitable zone. The inner and outer radii of this zone vary with the luminosity of the star, as does the time interval during which the zone survives. Stars more massive than the Sun have a larger habitable zone, but remain on the Sun-like "main sequence" of stellar evolution for a shorter time interval. Small red dwarfs have the opposite problem, with a smaller habitable zone that is subject to higher levels of magnetic activity and the effects of tidal locking from close orbits. Hence, stars in the intermediate mass range such as the Sun may have a greater likelihood for Earth-like life to develop. The location of the star within a galaxy may also affect the likelihood of life forming. Stars in regions with a greater abundance of heavier elements that can form planets, in combination with a low rate of potentially habitat-damaging supernova events, are predicted to have a higher probability of hosting planets with complex life. The variables of the Drake equation are used to discuss the conditions in planetary systems where civilisation is most likely to exist. Use of the equation to predict the amount of extraterrestrial life, however, is difficult; because many of the variables are unknown, the equation functions as more of a mirror to what its user already thinks. As a result, the number of civilisations in the galaxy can be estimated as low as 9.1 x 10, suggesting a minimum value of 1, or as high as 15.6 million (1.56 x 10); for the calculations, see Drake equation.


title: Life

text: A "Confidence of Life Detection" scale (CoLD) for reporting evidence of life beyond Earth has been proposed.


title: Life

text: Artificial life is the simulation of any aspect of life, as through computers, robotics, or biochemistry. The study of artificial life imitates traditional biology by recreating some aspects of biological phenomena. Scientists study the logic of living systems by creating artificial environments—seeking to understand the complex information processing that defines such systems. While life is, by definition, alive, artificial life is generally referred to as data confined to a digital environment and existence.


title: Life

text: Synthetic biology is a new area of biotechnology that combines science and biological engineering. The common goal is the design and construction of new biological functions and systems not found in nature. Synthetic biology includes the broad redefinition and expansion of biotechnology, with the ultimate goals of being able to design and build engineered biological systems that process information, manipulate chemicals, fabricate materials and structures, produce energy, provide food, and maintain and enhance human health and the environment.


title: Life

text: Death is the termination of all vital functions or life processes in an organism or cell. It can occur as a result of an accident, violence, medical conditions, biological interaction, malnutrition, poisoning, senescence, or suicide. After death, the remains of an organism re-enter the biogeochemical cycle. Organisms may be consumed by a predator or a scavenger and leftover organic material may then be further decomposed by detritivores, organisms that recycle detritus, returning it to the environment for reuse in the food chain.


title: Life

text: One of the challenges in defining death is in distinguishing it from life. Death would seem to refer to either the moment life ends, or when the state that follows life begins. However, determining when death has occurred is difficult, as cessation of life functions is often not simultaneous across organ systems. Such determination, therefore, requires drawing conceptual lines between life and death. This is problematic, however, because there is little consensus over how to define life. The nature of death has for millennia been a central concern of the world's religious traditions and of philosophical inquiry. Many religions maintain faith in either a kind of afterlife or reincarnation for the soul, or resurrection of the body at a later date.


title: Life

text: Extinction is the process by which a group of taxa or species dies out, reducing biodiversity. The moment of extinction is generally considered the death of the last individual of that species. Because a species' potential range may be very large, determining this moment is difficult, and is usually done retrospectively after a period of apparent absence. Species become extinct when they are no longer able to survive in changing habitat or against superior competition. In Earth's history, over 99% of all the species that have ever lived are extinct; however, mass extinctions may have accelerated evolution by providing opportunities for new groups of organisms to diversify.


title: Life

text: Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals, plants, and other organisms from the remote past. The totality of fossils, both discovered and undiscovered, and their placement in fossil-containing rock formations and sedimentary layers (strata) is known as the "fossil record". A preserved specimen is called a fossil if it is older than the arbitrary date of 10,000 years ago. Hence, fossils range in age from the youngest at the start of the Holocene Epoch to the oldest from the Archaean Eon, up to 3.4 billion years old.