COMETS POSSIBLY THE ORIGIN OF LIFE

Dateline - August 1, 2009   The watery environment of early comets, together with the vast quantity of organics already discovered in comets, would have provided ideal conditions for primitive bacteria to grow and multiply. The formation of the solar system itself is thought to have been triggered by shock waves that emanated from the explosion of a nearby supernova. The supernova injected radioactive material such as Aluminium-26 into the primordial... Read more

LIGHTNING STRIKE CREATES MINERALS CRUCIAL FOR EARLY ORGANISMS

Dateline - July 14, 2009   The high energy of a lightning strike creates an unusual form of phosphorus once common on primordial Earth and still used by many microbes today.  Read More →

ROSETTA STONE OF BACTERIAL COMMUNICATION DISCOVERED

Dateline - July 14, 2009   Although they have no sensory organs, bacteria can get a good idea about what’s going on in their neighborhood and communicate with each other, mainly by secreting and taking in chemicals from their surrounding environment.   Even though there are millions of different kinds of bacteria with their own ways of sensing the world around them, bioengineers believe they have found a principle common to all of them -... Read more

METEOROID BOMBARDMENT MAY HAVE MADE EARTH (AND MARS) MORE HABITABLE

Researchers suggest the delivery of this water could have made Earth’s and Mars’ atmospheres wetter. The release of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide could have trapped more energy from sunlight to make Earth and Mars warm enough to sustain liquid oceans. Image from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090601085930.htm  Read More →

FOR DIFFERENT SPECIES, DIFFERENT FUNCTIONS FOR EMBRYONIC MICRO-RNAs

Researchers looking at the role of microRNAs in the African clawed frog embryo and human embryonic stem cells, comparing their findings with earlier ones in fish, and found that although the genes for these microRNAs - single strands of RNA that put the brakes on gene expression - were identical across the three species, their function was not. “The naïve assumption is that if we understand what these microRNAs do in a fish or in the frog, we can... Read more

SELF-ASSEMBLY OF DNA BUILDING BLOCKS CONTROLLED

Researchers have managed to carefully control the self-assembly of guanosine, one of the building blocks of DNA. Image:  From European Science Federation at www.esf.org/conferences/09289  Read More →

THE CHEMICAL REACTIONS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ORIGIN OF LIFE

New findings map out the chemical reactions that could have formed molecules of RNA, a close cousin of DNA, from the basic materials available more than 3.85 billion years ago, researchers report online May 13 in Nature. See also text from Nature article here.  Read More →