Alcohol consumption changes during the first COVID-19 lockdown: an online population survey in a convenience sample of French-speaking Belgian residents.

An online survey among French-speaking Belgians (N=7711) investigated self-reported changes in alcohol consumption during the first COVID-19-related lockdown (March 17 - May 4 2020). Population-weighted estimates indicated that 31.37% of the population increased consumption during lockdown, 30.

Life as a cosmic imperative?

The origin of life on Earth may be divided into two stages separated by the first appearance of replicable molecules, most probably of RNA. The first stage depended exclusively on chemistry. The second stage likewise involved chemistry, but with the additional participation of selection, a necessary concomitant of inevitable replication accidents.

Chemistry and selection.

Life is the product of chemistry, which obeys deterministic laws, and of natural selection, which operates on variants offered to it by chance, but may, in a number of cases, have been provided with a sufficiently extensive array of variants to be optimizing. Thus, the origin and evolution of life have been largely shaped by the contingency of environmental conditions. The possibility remaining open for consideration is that certain critical conditions are sufficiently reproducible for life to arise and even to evolve into conscious, intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe.

The origin of eukaryotes: a reappraisal.

Ever since the elucidation of the main structural and functional features of eukaryotic cells and subsequent discovery of the endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria and plastids, two opposing hypotheses have been proposed to account for the origin of eukaryotic cells. One hypothesis postulates that the main features of these cells, including their ability to capture food by endocytosis and to digest it intracellularly, were developed first, and later had a key role in the adoption of endosymbionts; the other proposes that the transformation was triggered by an interaction between two typical prokaryotic cells, one of which became the host and the other the endosymbiont. Re-examination of this question in the light of cell-biological and phylogenetic data leads to the conclusion that the first model is more likely to be the correct one.