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Tag Archives: origin of life
NEWS: Short List
Transcranial direct current stimulation: Stoking the brain with electricity – Brain Enhancement | While most likely the majority of neuroscientists conduct experiments to read the electrical activity in the brain, there are some interested in stimulating the brain with electricity. With modern techniques this stimulation has become more precise, and the monitoring of reactions (that’s [...]
Posted in News: Also tagged alternative energy, brain enhancement, nanotechnology, photonics, synthetic biology Leave a comment
An odd couple: Arsenic and Life
It was unlikely that GFAJ-1 of the Halomonadaceae family of Gammaproteobacteria would grip the imagination; but it did. Of course, it did because instead of the long scientific name or the cryptic GFAJ-1, it was simply called Alien Life! This, of course, caused a minor sensation. It was even covered by the non-science media. The [...]
Posted in Impact: Origin of Life Also tagged alien life, arsenic, arsenic based life, biochemistry, DNA, GFAJ-1, phosphorus, RNA, Wolfe-Simon Leave a comment
New study: It’s possible life originated in ice
Life (on Earth) had to start somewhere, why not in ice? Why not indeed, except that for many decades it’s been assumed that life started in a – warm – primordial soup of some kind. Perhaps not a ‘soup,’ but somewhere warm or nearly hot (not boiling, of course) such as near an undersea volcanic [...]
Posted in News: Origin of Life Also tagged DNA, ice pockets, molecular chemistry, organic chemistry, ribozyme, RNA, solar system life 1 Comment
Gabon fossils push multicellular life to 2.1 billion years
The more that is learned about how life began on Earth, the more likely it seems life could originate elsewhere. Such is one of the implications of recent news in paleobiology: Fossils of multicellular organisms have been found in Gabon, Africa that date to approximately 2.1 billion years ago. That’s at least 400 million years [...]
Posted in News: Origin of Life Also tagged eukaryote, exobiology, fossil, Gabon, multicellular life, paleobiology Leave a comment
Found: Another molecule needed at the origin of life
Very often important science is constructed by a myriad of small advances in knowledge. This is almost certainly going to be true for answering one of the big questions in biology: “How did life on Earth originate?” It’s been known for a long time that it probably originated where there was a concentrated mixture of [...]
Posted in News: Origin of Life Also tagged biochemistry, DNA, ethidium, intercalator, oligonucleotides, organic compound, paleochemistry, polymer, RNA Leave a comment
Ribozymes and the origin of life
It could be called the search for the origin of life, but instead of a sweeping theory (primordial soup and lightning), microbiologists are concentrating on the many pieces that, one way or another, came together to constitute ‘life.’ Some new research from a team at the University of Colorado (Boulder, USA) points to the smallest [...]
Posted in News: Origin of Life Also tagged biochemistry, enzyme, microbiology, primordial soup, proteins, ribozyme, RNA Leave a comment
Is it goodbye to “Primordial soup?”
Over the years how many times have you encountered the term ‘primordial soup’ to explain the ferment in which life originated on Earth? The idea of a kind of organic broth in Earth’s early waters, struck by lightning, ultraviolet light, or some other catalyst, and producing slowly but surely the various compounds that eventually take [...]
Posted in Impact: Origin of Life Also tagged biochemistry, biology, cell, chemiosmosis, geochemistry, ions, LUCA, membrane, proton gradient Leave a comment
From Prussian blue, the compounds of life
Piecing together the story of life’s origin just got more colorful. (I couldn’t help using this trite journalistic phrase, sorry.) Prussian blue, the famous blue color used in dyes and blueprints, is also one of the oldest complex organic compounds known. Now, thanks to recent research at the Astrobiology Centre (INTA-CSIC, Madrid, Spain), it appears [...]
Posted in News: Origins of Life Also tagged DNA, organic chemistry, prebiotic, Prussian blue, RNA, urea Leave a comment
New Study: Archean oceans cooler, better for origin of life
A key part of the hypothesis for the origin of life on Earth is that it developed in the oceans. The conventional model of the early oceans has stipulated that the waters of the middle Archean eon, roughly 4.0 to 3.5 billion years ago, were too hot for (abundant) life. The model also assumed that [...]
NASA re-creates key component of RNA
What happens to water-ice on a comet passing through a zone of intense ultraviolet radiation? If the water-ice contains any molecules of pyrimidine, some of it will be transformed into uracil. How do we know this? NASA has recreated the process in the lab. So what? Most water-ice in comets contains various organic molecules, pyrimidine [...]
Posted in News: Origin of Life Also tagged asteroids, comets, DNA, NASA, pyrimidine, RNA, uracil Leave a comment
Mars water: What’s all the fuss?