Posts Tagged ‘life’
Scottish Scientists Are Trying to Create Inorganic Life
This research is part of Cronin's larger project to show that inorganic compounds are able to self-replicate and evolve like biological cells do. The ultimate goal is to give these inorganic cells life-like properties so they can evolve and eventually be used in materials science.
Cronin said he believes creating inorganic life is entirely possible, that if biological organisms evolved from single-cell bacteria, so should life be able to evolve from inorganic microorganisms. This “inorganic living technology,” if it works, could change the way we think about evolution, showing that it's not a process exclusive to biology, and that non-carbon-based life could exist.
[BBC]
Found: A Batch of DNA Molecules That Seem To Have Originated in Space
This is big news, of course, because if the ingredients for life were brought here from some external source, there’s always the possibility that the same thing has happened elsewhere in the universe--possibly many times over.
Scientists have been extracting fragments of DNA from meteorites for decades now, but there was never really hard proof that those pieces of biological molecules were native to the extraterrestrial object rather than terrestrial contamination that occurred when the object slammed into Earth. So while the idea of DNA riding aboard extraterrestrial objects has been floated before, this is the first time we’ve been presented real evidence backing that notion.
The idea isn’t that these building blocks are just passengers aboard meteorites, but that the chemistry inside asteroids and comets can actually manufacture the essential building blocks of biology. And a liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry analysis of sample meteorites and the environments where they were found seems to confirm this.
Here’s the basic gist of the findings: The LC and MS analysis separated and analyzed the component parts of the samples and found adenine and guanine, two of the components of the double helix that make up the code that tells our cells what to do. They also found hypoxanthine and xanthine, which don’t factor in to DNA but are used in other biological functions.
But more interestingly, the researchers found three nucleobase-related molecules: purine, 2,6-diaminopurine, and 6,8-diaminopurine. These last two are rarely used in biology, but they are like analogs for nucleobases--the same core molecule but structurally slightly different. That’s really important because if the meteorites were terrestrially contaminated, they wouldn’t be there (because they are not used in biology). But if the chemical processes going on inside an extraterrestrial object really are churning out prebiotic stuff, then you would expect to see all kinds of nucleobases--the ones used for biology, and others that aren’t.
Moreover, analysis of the Antarctic ice and Australian soil around where the meteorites were found showed the amounts of the two nucleobases as well as the hypoxanthine and xanthine to be drastically lower. If the contamination were terrestrial, one could expect equal amounts of the molecules (or less) to be present in the meteorite samples, certainly not more.
It’s a pretty convincing case, though one that will undergo a lot more scientific scrutiny. If comets and asteroids really are churning out the ingredients for life, it certainly changes our picture of life in the universe, and the possibility that other rocks out there might be harboring their own biological systems.
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As Synthetic Biology Marches On, Our First Encounter With Alien Life May Happen in the Lab
Synthetic biology and the idea of synthetic life aren’t new by any means. Just last year, for instance, J. Craig Venter by claiming that his institute had created the world’s first fully synthetic, self-replicating cell. Other researchers disputed the notion that the cell was an example of life created from scratch, but the idea was there; chemicals and molecules researchers brew in their labs may at some point spring to life.
That’s going to open up a brave new world of biology and chemistry of course, and that’s why you should probably take a minute to click through and read this piece on your lunch break. It’s mostly the story of Scripps Research Institute scientist Gerald F. Joyce, who has created some molecules of RNA--very many, actually--that are capable of replicating (reproducing) and adapting (evolving), meeting two of the main pillars in many definitions of life.
His RNA molecules aren’t self-sufficient and can exist only under controlled laboratory conditions. And Joyce himself doesn’t consider them synthetic life--yet. But we’re getting much, much closer to creating it in the lab he says. After all, some respected biologists have posited that in the early days of life, there was no DNA. RNA acted as both the machinery of life (the role it plays now) as well as the design drawings (the role currently played by DNA).
In other words, RNA molecules themselves aren’t considered alive, but at some point in the past life may have been somehow breathed into RNA. That could happen again in some test tube somewhere. Joyce already has his RNA molecules reproducing, evolving, doing battle in Petri dishes in which only the fittest survive. Which is pretty exciting/scary/anxiety-inducing/amazing. Click through below for the whole story, it’s worth a read.
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Herschel Telescope Spots a Star Spewing Powerful Water Jets into Interstellar Space
This discovery is interesting on a number of levels. For one, it indicates that throughout the universe young protostars could be distributing vast quantities of water, potentially seeding life elsewhere. But it also sheds some light on the formation of our own sun, and the role water may have played in its formation and in the formation of our own planet.
The star was discovered by ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory, whose eyes were able to pierce the dense cloud of gas and dust that is feeding the star’s formation. There, Herschel saw light signature indicative of hydrogen and oxygen, and in following those traces found that these atoms are forming water on and around the star. But as the molecules move through the star and are injected into the massive jets of gas spewing from the poles, the heat and pressure vaporize the water into jets of gas.
Only when the gas jets are far enough away from the star do they rapidly cool and turn back into liquid. At this point, the water droplets are essentially bullets of water moving something like 80 times faster than the average round fired from a rifle. And there’s a lot of them. The amount of water ejecting from the star is equal to the amount that flows through the Amazon every second, researchers say.
Astronomers think this water-spewing stage is short, but that it is also something every protostar goes through. If so, that means water could be scattered all over the universe. And that’s an interesting thought indeed.
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Seafloor Drilling Expedition Finds Deepest Life Yet Discovered
The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program – an international expedition that explores, samples, and analyzes the subseafloor – was drilling in the Atlantic Massif, a tectonically active region in the central Atlantic where the basalt layer that separates the seafloor layer from the underlying gabbroic layer is thin (just 230 feet). The team drilled more than 4,500 feet down where temperatures are just above the sea level boiling point.
In these high pressure, high temperature environments the team expected to find some life – they’d previously found micro-organisms living in the basalt layer above – but what they found surprised them. They found a lot of life, mostly communities of bacteria that had evolved to feed off hydrocarbons like methane, similar to the ones found in oil reservoirs. That suggests the bacteria might not have evolved there in the gabbroic layer, but migrated downward from the layers above.
Further, finding life that deep that survives off hydrocarbons suggest that they might find life even deeper still, all the way down in the mantle. The processes that produce oil and gas in the crust could conceivably also happen at deeper layers. If they do, that means life could reach deeper into the earth than previously imagined. And if life is thriving that deep beneath the Earth's surface, who knows where else in the universe it might be hiding.
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Taxonomists Launch A Grand Effort to Classify Every Species on Earth, With Your Help
The botanists, zoologists, ecologists, and computer scientists present at the conference believe that a number of modern developments make such a feat feasible. One is the ability to organize information online. Digitization of information, they explained, keeps taxonomists from reinventing the wheel by re-classifying species that were previously catalogued in obscure places. “My productivity has increased by an order of magnitude in recent years because of the Internet,” noted Dennis Stevenson, a botanist at the New York Botanical Garden.
The Internet also allows taxonomists to make use of crowd sourcing. Already, “citizen scientists” around the globe are contributing their knowledge of local flora and fauna to Wikipedia-like databases such as the and . Sara Graves, a computer scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and her colleagues are developing smart that can be used to analyze and classify photos of species taken by amateur enthusiasts.
Algorithm Development and Mining (ADaM), as it’s called, was originally built to analyze NASA satellite images. The new version will use pattern recognition to troll through databases of photos of living specimens. “It does extremely fine-grained analysis of slices of images, and if it doesn’t recognize something, like an unusual insect leg, then the experts get involved.” In other words, ADaM will serve as the middleman between trigger-happy and, well, real ones.
The group plans to write a report on the Sustain What? proceedings that will outline the likely costs of their endeavor, as well as stressing its urgency: ““If we’re going to be addressing biodiversity and conservation, we need to be aware of what’s out there,” said Graves.
Discovery of the First Earth-Like, Habitable Exoplanet Will Be Announced in May of 2011 (Maybe)
How does this math work exactly? The details, of course, are complicated and contain a lot of subscript variables and other mathematic acrobatics that we won’t get into here (a PDF of Professors Samuel Arbesmans and Gregory Laughlins, of Harvard and Cal Santa Cruz respectively, is available ), but essentially they look at the properties of exoplanets discovered thus far by instruments like NASA’s Kepler observatory. From that data, they’ve devised what they term the “habitability metric,” a value representing a planet’s temperature and mass that determines whether or not it can support life.
What the habitability metric tells us, if we chart the values for all the planets already discovered, is that a) we’ve found a lot of planets thus far, mostly gas giants but some smaller icy rocks like Neptune, and b) with every planet we find we’re statistically closer to finding that orbiting chunk of debris with a habitability value of 1, or a match for Earth-like conditions.
Depending on how you want to weigh all that data, you can draw different conclusions. Following the long tail, we find that there’s a 66 percent probability we’ll find a habitable planet by 2013, and a 75 percent probability by 2020. But the median date of discovery is somewhat closer. To quote Arbesman and Laughlin’s paper: “Using a bootstrap analysis of currently discovered exoplanets, we predict the discovery of the first Earth-like planet to be announced in the first half of 2011, with the likeliest date being early May 2011.”
A bold call, sure, but an interesting one on several levels. Obviously it’s exciting to think about locating a planet in the galaxy that could be the target of a future mission and all the ramifications such a discovery might have. But further, as points out, Kepler is all set to reveal it’s scientific findings in February. Which means, if these two are to be believed, that someone besides the researchers at NASA’s flagship exoplanet hunter will earn the distinguished distinction as the astronomer who found the first habitable planet outside our solar system.
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