Origin Of Life

That doesn’t mean we will get somewhere; it means we could possibly get somewhere. From the Atlantic, on an OOL meeting in Japan: “To kick off the meeting, I’m going to do the only thing I can reasonably do, which is ask the dumbest scientific questions I can think of: Did life originate more than once 4 billion years ago? Do we know for sure that origins of life events aren’t happening today, on the Earth? If life’s origin was a process that took tens of millions of years, how can we hope to repeat that process in an experiment? And what do we even mean when we say that something is “alive”? Not only are these all good questions, Read More ›

Life seems to want to survive somehow, yet we never see anything that isn’t alive coming to life.   Further to: Looking for life in all the wrong places, the BBC tells us about the mud volcano worms: The Beaufort Sea tubeworms are only 7-8cm long. However, they are distantly related to giant tube-dwelling annelid worms that are found near deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Such worms can be 2m long. Both groups of worms survive without light, under intense pressures and in water that is often laced with acid and toxic gases. They can cope with a wide range of temperatures. Often one end of a tubeworm can experience near-freezing temperatures, while the other end is exposed to hot fluids flowing Read More ›

The harshest places on Earth … and often finding it. We seem to find life everywhere on Earth, nowhere else. From PBS: Before Northeast Natural Energy can send down fluid to fracture the Marcellus Shales, buried more than 1.5 miles below the surface for 400 million years, Wrighton, Wilkins, and a team of scientists will be collecting rock samples hauled up from the deep. They might find life:. The discovery that microbes could live in environments far more extreme than anyone suspected opened a wide range of habitats to microbial exploration. While some scientists explored the frigid, windswept deserts of Antarctica, others, like Bo Barker Jørgensen and Karsten Pedersen, geomicrobiologists at Aarhus University in Denmark and Chalmers University of Technology Read More ›

It’s possible, says a recent Biology Direct paper: Here’s the abstract: Background: Microbial genetic diversity is often investigated via the comparison of relatively similar 16S molecules through multiple alignments between reference sequences and novel environmental samples using phylogenetic trees, direct BLAST matches, or phylotypes counts. However, are we missing novel lineages in the microbial dark universe by relying on standard phylogenetic and BLAST methods? If so, how can we probe that universe using alternative approaches? We performed a novel type of multi-marker analysis of genetic diversity exploiting the topology of inclusive sequence similarity networks. Results: Our protocol identified 86 ancient gene families, well distributed and rarely transferred across the 3 domains of life, and retrieved their environmental homologs among 10 Read More ›

About time. Readers may recall that the first billion years of life when, we are told, simple microbes dominated, have been considered boring. Well, books where we have only .01 percent of the text preserved are boring too. But things may be changing. From Science News: 1.8 billion years ago, low oxygen may not have hindered life after all After this wild youth of rapid change, things slowed down. About 1.8 billion years ago, the climate stabilized. Oxygen levels steadied. Evolution seemingly stalled. For around a billion years, not a lot changed on planet Earth. Scientists called this interval the dullest time in Earth’s history. It came to be known as the “boring billion.” But scientists are taking a fresh Read More ›

  In September of 2009 I started a new document on my computer entitled “A System of Symbols”, where I was going to write about the part of design theory that interested me the most – that is, the representations that are required for self-replication (von Neumann, Pattee). My goal was to inventory all the physical conditions necessary for one thing to represent another thing in a material universe. I wrote and rewrote that essay for more than four years — reading, learning, and sharing along the way. As it turns out, writing that essay was my way of coming to understand the issues, and I spent a great deal of that time trying to articulate things I had come to Read More ›

Rosetta’s most surprising discovery so far. From Phys.org: Stunned scientists announced Wednesday the unexpected discovery of large quantities of oxygen on a comet which streaked past the Sun in August with a European spacecraft in tow. The find came as a “big surprise”, and challenges mainstream theories on the formation of our Solar System, said scientist Andre Bieler of the University of Michigan. The oxygen is believed to be older than our solar system. As O2 mixes easily with other elements, “we never thought that oxygen could ‘survive’ for billions of years” in a pristine state, said Kathrin Altwegg of the University of Bern, who co-authored a study in the journal Nature. More. We are advised not to jump to Read More ›

From Digg: Will we recognize alien life when we see it? However, one of his most interesting works is a slim book from 1944, based on a set of lectures Schrödinger gave in Dublin. It poses a single question: What is life? Good question. As it happens, we noted earlier, The definition of life has reached the point where science historian George Dyson tells us, “Life is whatever you define it to be.” Richard Dawkins has suggested it is “anything highly statistically improbable, but in a particular direction.” And at a year 2000 international “What is life?” conference, no two definitions were the same. Biochemist Edward Trifonov noted that there are 123 definitions available and, undeterred, promptly proposed his own: Read More ›

From New Scientist: It’s not the first time that people have claimed the discovery of potentially organic carbon in Hadean zircons – but the carbon in those earlier claims turned out to be an artefact of the preparation techniques used to study the zircons, says Harrison. “I think there will be little dispute regarding the primary nature of the inclusions,” he says. … Ultimately, carbon isotope data on its own is too ambiguous to decide whether Hadean carbon is evidence of Hadean life, says Thomas McCollom at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “I know a lot of people want to use such data as evidence of life, but this is governed more by what they want the outcome to be Read More ›

From Phys.org: Life on Earth likely started 4.1 billion years ago—much earlier than scientists thought UCLA geochemists have found evidence that life likely existed on Earth at least 4.1 billion years ago—300 million years earlier than previous research suggested. The discovery indicates that life may have begun shortly after the planet formed 4.54 billion years ago. “Twenty years ago, this would have been heretical; finding evidence of life 3.8 billion years ago was shocking,” said Mark Harrison, co-author of the research and a professor of geochemistry at UCLA. … “The early Earth certainly wasn’t a hellish, dry, boiling planet; we see absolutely no evidence for that,” Harrison said. “The planet was probably much more like it is today than previously Read More ›

From big think: MIT Physicist Proposes New “Meaning of Life” MIT physicist Jeremy England claims that life may not be so mysterious after all, despite the fact it is apparently derived from non-living matter. In a new paper, England explains how simple physical laws make complex life more likely than not. In other words, it would be more surprising to find no life in the universe than a buzzing place like planet Earth. Excuse me, but we currently have a sample size of 1. What does all matter—rocks, plants, animals, and humans—have in common? We all absorb and dissipate energy. While a rock absorbs a small amount of energy before releasing what it doesn’t use back into the universe, life Read More ›

From RealClearScience: The Primordial Soup Was Edible Back in 2005, when I was a first-year microbiology graduate student, I enrolled in a course on bacterial physiology. One of our guest lecturers, Dr. Franklin Harold, was an esteemed researcher in bioenergetics, a field that examines how cells derive and utilize energy. One evening, outside of class, I happened upon Dr. Harold at a seminar, and I asked him a question: “What is your opinion on origin of life research?” He responded, “It has been an abject failure.” Ten years later, it is still difficult to argue with him. True. There is no shortage of theories but Put simply, a field with so many different interpretations is wandering lost in the long Read More ›

THE DESIGN OF LIFE COLLECTION is a spectacular journey to uncover stunning evidence for intelligent design in the animal kingdom. It includes three feature length documentariesIncluding Metamorphosis: the Beauty and Design of Butterflies, FLIGHT: The Genius of Birds, and LIVING WATERS: Intelligent design in the Oceans of the Earth. For more information visit: https://intelligentdesign.film/designoflife From Illustra Media Note: Back to blogging shortly.

From ScienceDaily: Study adds to evidence that viruses are alive Until now, viruses have been difficult to classify, said University of Illinois crop sciences and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology professor Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, who led the new analysis with graduate student Arshan Nasir. In its latest report, the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses recognized seven orders of viruses, based on their shapes and sizes, genetic structure and means of reproducing. B21″Under this classification, viral families belonging to the same order have likely diverged from a common ancestral virus,” the authors wrote. “However, only 26 (of 104) viral families have been assigned to an order, and the evolutionary relationships of most of them remain unclear.” Part of Read More ›

The Japanese National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) are reporting about new research that throws a small wrinkle into the search for life on planets outside our solar system. Such bodies, known as “exoplanets,” have emerged as one of the more exciting areas of astronomical study — an entire new field of research having essentially arisen in little more than two decades and now occupying many full-time researchers, several earth-bound telescopes, and even dedicated space missions. Early results have been impressive, with the improvements in sensor technology matched by the exponential increase in discovered bodies. After the first lone exoplanet was discovered around a main sequence star in 1995, a small trickle of additional exoplanets were discovered. Then the trickle Read More ›