What the hell kind of math is this?

Yeah – if there’s a fire or some other kind of emergency at your house/apartment and you’re not there, that kind of sticker is really important.

The full text of the “umbilical dirt” paper (cited at the end of the WaPo article) is freely available.

Here’s a paper about self-replicating proteins, and this one is about self-replicating clay crystal structures, and how they might have been catalysts for biomolecule synthesis.