The Daily Galaxy: Great Discoveries Channel

Can Hitchiking Microbes Survive Millions of Years of Space Travel? Experts Say "Yes"

In a unique experiment on a galactic scale, millions of bacterial spores were purposely exposed to space, to see how solar radiation affects them and the results supported the idea that not only could life have arrived on Earth on meteorites, but that considerable material has flowed between planets.

In a unique experiment on a galactic scale, millions of bacterial spores were purposely exposed to space, to see how solar radiation affects them and the results supported the idea that not only could life have arrived on Earth on meteorites, but that considerable material has flowed between planets.

Ancient Viruses Spurred Human Evolution - A Galaxy Classic

When the mapping of the human genome was completed in 2003, researchers discovered a shocking fact: our bodies are littered with the shards of retroviruses, fragments of the chemical code from which all genetic material is made. This discovery has created a new discipline, paleovirology, which seeks to better understand the impact of modern diseases by studying the genetic history of ancient viruses.

Lakes of Antarctica Isolated for Millions of Years Discovered with New, Unknown Viruses

Like a modern, micro version of The Thing, Antarctica's icy lakes have been discovered to house a surprisingly diverse community of viruses, including some that were previously unidentified. The finding could shed light on whether microbial life evolved independently in Antarctica, which has been isolated for millions of years, or they were introduced there more recently.

Some of these lakes which are frozen nine months of the year, have little animal life and are dominated by microorganisms, including algae, bacteria, protozoans and viruses. A virus is little more than a package of DNA surrounded by a capsule structure. To survive, viruses must hijack, or infect, living cells and use the host's equipment to replicate.

Antonio Alcami, a researcher from the Spanish Research Council and his colleagues analyzed DNA from viruses found in water samples collected from Antarctica's Lake Limnopolar, a surface lake on Livingston Island. They found nearly 10,000 species, including some small DNA viruses that had never before been identified. In total, the viruses were from 12 different families, some of which may be completely new to science, the researchers suggest.

The New, Revised Charles Darwin: "Life Originated from the Spontaneous Generation of Inanimate Chemical Matter"

Though Charles Darwin thought of religion as a tribal survival strategy, in 1879 he wrote that "I think that generally ... an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.” When he published The Origin of Species 150 years ago, he deliberately avoided the subject of the origin of life. This, coupled with the mention of the 'Creator' in the last paragraph of the book, led many to believe he was not willing to commit on the matter. 

Now, an international team, led by Juli Peretó of the Cavanilles Institute in Valencia, refutes that idea and shows that the British naturalist did explain in other documents how our first ancestors could have come into being.

"The DNA Code" - Is Life as We Know It Written into the Laws of the Universe? A Galaxy Classic

A recent mathematical analysis says that life as we know it is written into the laws of reality.  DNA is built from a set of twenty amino acids - the first ten of those can create simple prebiotic life, and now it seems that those ten are thermodynamically destined to occur wherever they can.

For those unfamiliar with thermodynamics, it's the Big Brother of all energy equations and science itself.  You can apply quantum mechanics at certain scales, and Newtonian mechanics work at the right speeds, but if Thermodynamics says something then everyone listens. An energy analysis by Professors Pudritz and Higgs of McMaster University shows that the first ten amino acids are likely to form at relatively low temperatures and pressures, and the calculated odds of formation match the concentrations of these life-chemicals found in meteorite samples.

They also match those in simulations of early Earth, and most critically, those simulations were performed by other people.  The implications are staggering: good news for anyone worried about how we're alone, and bad news for anyone who demands some kind of "Designer" to put life together - it seems that physics can assemble the organic jigsaw all by itself, thank you very much, and has probably done so throughout space since the beginning of everything.

The study indicates that you don't need a miracle to arrive at the chemical cocktail for early life, just a decently large asteroid with the right components.  That's all.  The entire universe could be stuffed with life, from the earliest prebiotic protein-a-likes to fully DNAed descendants.  The path from one to the other is long, but we've had thirteen and a half billion years so far and it's happened at least once.

The other ten amino acids aren't as easy to form, but they'll still turn up - and the process of "stepwise evolution" means that once the simpler systems work, they can grab the rarer "epic drops" of more sophisticated chemicals as they occur - kind of a World of Lifecraft except you literally get a life when you play.  And once even the most sophisticated structure is part of a replicating organism, there's plenty to go round.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

Humans and Aliens might share DNA roots

Robot Evolution Triggers Question: "What is Life?" -A Galaxy Classic

There is ongoing debate about what constitutes life. Synthetic bacteria for example, are created by man and yet also alive. Some go so far as to say that robot “emotions” may already have occurred—that current robots have not only displayed emotions, but in some ways have experienced them.

Super Microbes Ideal for Life on Exo Planets Discovered in Greenland -A Galaxy Insight

A team of scientists have revived a bacteria after a hundred thousand years under three kilometers of glacier.  The microorganism is one of a new type only recently revealed to science, is small enough to pass through standard sterile filters, and is final proof that scientists just don't watch sci-fi movies.

The new ultramicrobacterium (and that's not hyperbolistic neology, that's the actual scientific name) Herminiimonas Glaciei was recovered from underneath Greenland glaciers and took almost a year to slowly heat back to life.  With stages like "Seven months at 2 degrees C", reanimating frozen microlife isn't like microwaving popcorn.  Penn State University scientists coaxed the cells into action and created colonies of organisms twenty thousand times smaller than the average human cell.

Did Clay Trigger 1st Life on Earth?

In the early 1990s, Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School began investigating the molecular origins of life in order to understand how chemicals combined to form the first living organisms on primitive Earth. Inspired by Tom Cech and Sidney Altman’s discovery that RNA could catalyze chemical reactions inside cells (which later earned them a Nobel Prize), Szostak began to explore RNA’s ability to catalyze its own reproduction.

Building on earlier work by other scientists, Szostak and colleagues began experimenting with a clay mixture common on early Earth called montmorillonite, which was found to catalyze the chemical reactions needed to make RNA.

Explore & Interact With a Life-sized Blue Whale: A Galaxy Insight

To experience the size and beauty and sounds of this largest animal to have ever lived on the planet, just click on the awesome interactive banner of a blue whale at the end of this post (published by the World Dolphin and Cetacea Conservation Society).

Image of the Day: The Creative Evolution of Darwin's "Origin of the Species"

 

In a brilliant new work, Ben Fry, one of the demigods of information graphics, traces the evolution of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species correction by correction, edit by edit, revealing the stunning creative process of one of the great geniuses of the modern era. Fry's info-graphic image is titled "The Preservation of Favoured Traces"--a play on Darwin's famous phrase, the preservation of favored traits. You have to click the links to see Darwin's mind at work.

Can Hitchiking Microbes Survive Millions of Years of Space Travel? Experts Say "Yes"

In a unique experiment on a galactic scale, millions of bacterial spores were purposely exposed to space, to see how solar radiation affects them and the results supported the idea that not only could life have arrived on Earth on meteorites, but that considerable material has flowed between planets.

In a unique experiment on a galactic scale, millions of bacterial spores were purposely exposed to space, to see how solar radiation affects them and the results supported the idea that not only could life have arrived on Earth on meteorites, but that considerable material has flowed between planets.

Ancient Viruses Spurred Human Evolution - A Galaxy Classic

When the mapping of the human genome was completed in 2003, researchers discovered a shocking fact: our bodies are littered with the shards of retroviruses, fragments of the chemical code from which all genetic material is made. This discovery has created a new discipline, paleovirology, which seeks to better understand the impact of modern diseases by studying the genetic history of ancient viruses.

Lakes of Antarctica Isolated for Millions of Years Discovered with New, Unknown Viruses

Like a modern, micro version of The Thing, Antarctica's icy lakes have been discovered to house a surprisingly diverse community of viruses, including some that were previously unidentified. The finding could shed light on whether microbial life evolved independently in Antarctica, which has been isolated for millions of years, or they were introduced there more recently.

Some of these lakes which are frozen nine months of the year, have little animal life and are dominated by microorganisms, including algae, bacteria, protozoans and viruses. A virus is little more than a package of DNA surrounded by a capsule structure. To survive, viruses must hijack, or infect, living cells and use the host's equipment to replicate.

Antonio Alcami, a researcher from the Spanish Research Council and his colleagues analyzed DNA from viruses found in water samples collected from Antarctica's Lake Limnopolar, a surface lake on Livingston Island. They found nearly 10,000 species, including some small DNA viruses that had never before been identified. In total, the viruses were from 12 different families, some of which may be completely new to science, the researchers suggest.

The New, Revised Charles Darwin: "Life Originated from the Spontaneous Generation of Inanimate Chemical Matter"

Though Charles Darwin thought of religion as a tribal survival strategy, in 1879 he wrote that "I think that generally ... an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.” When he published The Origin of Species 150 years ago, he deliberately avoided the subject of the origin of life. This, coupled with the mention of the 'Creator' in the last paragraph of the book, led many to believe he was not willing to commit on the matter. 

Now, an international team, led by Juli Peretó of the Cavanilles Institute in Valencia, refutes that idea and shows that the British naturalist did explain in other documents how our first ancestors could have come into being.

"The DNA Code" - Is Life as We Know It Written into the Laws of the Universe? A Galaxy Classic

A recent mathematical analysis says that life as we know it is written into the laws of reality.  DNA is built from a set of twenty amino acids - the first ten of those can create simple prebiotic life, and now it seems that those ten are thermodynamically destined to occur wherever they can.

For those unfamiliar with thermodynamics, it's the Big Brother of all energy equations and science itself.  You can apply quantum mechanics at certain scales, and Newtonian mechanics work at the right speeds, but if Thermodynamics says something then everyone listens. An energy analysis by Professors Pudritz and Higgs of McMaster University shows that the first ten amino acids are likely to form at relatively low temperatures and pressures, and the calculated odds of formation match the concentrations of these life-chemicals found in meteorite samples.

They also match those in simulations of early Earth, and most critically, those simulations were performed by other people.  The implications are staggering: good news for anyone worried about how we're alone, and bad news for anyone who demands some kind of "Designer" to put life together - it seems that physics can assemble the organic jigsaw all by itself, thank you very much, and has probably done so throughout space since the beginning of everything.

The study indicates that you don't need a miracle to arrive at the chemical cocktail for early life, just a decently large asteroid with the right components.  That's all.  The entire universe could be stuffed with life, from the earliest prebiotic protein-a-likes to fully DNAed descendants.  The path from one to the other is long, but we've had thirteen and a half billion years so far and it's happened at least once.

The other ten amino acids aren't as easy to form, but they'll still turn up - and the process of "stepwise evolution" means that once the simpler systems work, they can grab the rarer "epic drops" of more sophisticated chemicals as they occur - kind of a World of Lifecraft except you literally get a life when you play.  And once even the most sophisticated structure is part of a replicating organism, there's plenty to go round.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

Humans and Aliens might share DNA roots

Robot Evolution Triggers Question: "What is Life?" -A Galaxy Classic

There is ongoing debate about what constitutes life. Synthetic bacteria for example, are created by man and yet also alive. Some go so far as to say that robot “emotions” may already have occurred—that current robots have not only displayed emotions, but in some ways have experienced them.

Super Microbes Ideal for Life on Exo Planets Discovered in Greenland -A Galaxy Insight

A team of scientists have revived a bacteria after a hundred thousand years under three kilometers of glacier.  The microorganism is one of a new type only recently revealed to science, is small enough to pass through standard sterile filters, and is final proof that scientists just don't watch sci-fi movies.

The new ultramicrobacterium (and that's not hyperbolistic neology, that's the actual scientific name) Herminiimonas Glaciei was recovered from underneath Greenland glaciers and took almost a year to slowly heat back to life.  With stages like "Seven months at 2 degrees C", reanimating frozen microlife isn't like microwaving popcorn.  Penn State University scientists coaxed the cells into action and created colonies of organisms twenty thousand times smaller than the average human cell.

Did Clay Trigger 1st Life on Earth?

In the early 1990s, Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School began investigating the molecular origins of life in order to understand how chemicals combined to form the first living organisms on primitive Earth. Inspired by Tom Cech and Sidney Altman’s discovery that RNA could catalyze chemical reactions inside cells (which later earned them a Nobel Prize), Szostak began to explore RNA’s ability to catalyze its own reproduction.

Building on earlier work by other scientists, Szostak and colleagues began experimenting with a clay mixture common on early Earth called montmorillonite, which was found to catalyze the chemical reactions needed to make RNA.

Explore & Interact With a Life-sized Blue Whale: A Galaxy Insight

To experience the size and beauty and sounds of this largest animal to have ever lived on the planet, just click on the awesome interactive banner of a blue whale at the end of this post (published by the World Dolphin and Cetacea Conservation Society).

Image of the Day: The Creative Evolution of Darwin's "Origin of the Species"

 

In a brilliant new work, Ben Fry, one of the demigods of information graphics, traces the evolution of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species correction by correction, edit by edit, revealing the stunning creative process of one of the great geniuses of the modern era. Fry's info-graphic image is titled "The Preservation of Favoured Traces"--a play on Darwin's famous phrase, the preservation of favored traits. You have to click the links to see Darwin's mind at work.