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From the X Files Dept: "The Pandora Hypothesis"

Tom McFay — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 07:02:00 +0000

“If every habitable world in the universe is unique, and the precise chemical conditions of a planet helps shape the life that evolves there, then avatars could allow aliens to visit other worlds from the safety of their spaceship. Could…

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From the X Files Dept: "The Pandora Hypothesis"

1st Monster Storm Observed on an ExoPlanet (VIDEO)

Tom McFay — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

“In the future, astronomers may be able to use this type of observation to study the atmospheres of Earth-like planets, to determine whether life also exists elsewhere in the Universe.” Ignas Snellen, ESO astronomer Move over, Jupiter! See ya, Saturn….

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1st Monster Storm Observed on an ExoPlanet (VIDEO)

The Coming Age of Avatars for Space Exploration

Tom McFay — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 08:30:00 +0000

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The Coming Age of Avatars for Space Exploration

Antimatter Lightning -Discovered Annihilating Bits Of Earth’s Atmosphere (A Galaxy Classic)

Tom McFay — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:18:00 +0000

Antimatter Lightning! We’re going to do our best, but nothing we could possibly write will be as awesome as the fact that’s real and on Earth. In fact, nothing you ever read for the rest of your life will be…

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Antimatter Lightning -Discovered Annihilating Bits Of Earth’s Atmosphere (A Galaxy Classic)

Image of the Day: "The Cosmic Eye" – Helix Nebula (A Weekend Feature)

Tom McFay — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 13:53:11 +0000

The Helix Nebula is the closest example of a planetary nebula created at the end of the life of a Sun-like star. The Helix Nebula, given a technical designation of NGC 7293, lies about 700 light-years away towards the constellation…

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Image of the Day: "The Cosmic Eye" – Helix Nebula (A Weekend Feature)

Future Tech Department (Humor – Weekend Edition)

Tom McFay — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: With thanks to our friends at gizmodo.com

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Future Tech Department (Humor – Weekend Edition)

Dwarf Galaxy Remnants Invading Milky Way

Tom McFay — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:02:00 +0000

The Milky Way has an estimated 160 globular clusters of which one quarter are thought to be ‘alien’ invaders from other galaxies, new research from Swinburne University of Technology (Australia) shows. Swinburne astronomer Professor Duncan Forbes has shown that many of our galaxy’s globular star clusters are actually foreigners – having been born elsewhere and then migrating to our Milky Way. “It turns out that many of the stars and star clusters we see when we look into the night sky are not natives, but aliens from other galaxies,” said Forbes. “They have made their way into our galaxy over the last few billion years.” Previously astronomers had suspected that some star clusters, which contain around a million stars each, were foreign to our galaxy, but it was difficult to positively identify which ones. Globular clusters, which are found in the halo of a galaxy, contain considerably more stars and are among the oldest stars in the universe. Almost every large galaxy has been found to possess a system of globular clusters. Using Hubble Space Telescope data, Forbes, along with his Canadian colleague Professor Terry Bridges, examined old star clusters within the Milky Way galaxy. They then compiled the largest ever high-quality database to record the age and chemical properties of each of these clusters. “Using this database we were able to identify key signatures in many of the star clusters that gave us tell-tale clues as to their external origin,” Forbes said. “We determined that these foreign-born globular star clusters actually make up about one quarter of our Milky Way globular star cluster system. That implies tens of millions of accreted stars – those that have joined and grown our galaxy – from globular star clusters alone.” The researchers’ work also suggests that the Milky Way may have swallowed-up more dwarf galaxies than was previously thought. “We found that many of the foreign clusters originally existed within dwarf galaxies – that is ‘mini’ galaxies of up to 100 million stars that sit within our larger Milky Way. Our work shows that there are more of these accreted dwarf galaxies in our Milky Way than was thought. Astronomers had been able to confirm the existence of two accreted dwarf galaxies in our Milky Way – but our research suggests that there might be as many as six yet to be discovered.” “Although the dwarf galaxies are broken-up and their stars assimilated into the Milky Way, the globular star clusters of the dwarf galaxy remain intact and survive the accretion process. This will have to be explored further, but it is a very exciting prospect that will help us to better understand the history of our own galaxy.” In addition to migration of Dwarf galaxy remnants, another team of Australian researchers discovered that the Milky Way galaxy has been cannibalizing on the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy (image at top) and others. The Sagittarius dwarf is a fascinating object, located at only 24 kiloparsecs from the Sun and 16 kiloparsecs from the Galactic Center (i.e. 75 000 and 50 000 light-years respectively), is the nearest known satellite of the Milky Way. The dwarf was discovered only recently in 1994, hidden to us by foreground Galactic stars. “The Sagittarius dwarf is a cosmic lightweight weighing 10,000 times less than our Milky Way,” Dr Stefan Keller said. “It has ventured too close to our galaxy and is now getting stretched out and slowly torn apart, a bit like spaghetti being wound round a fork” and being swallowed by our own Galaxy after complete disruption caused by Galactic tides, In the latest issue of the Astrophysical Journal, Dr Keller and researchers from the Australian National University reveal that a large band of stars at the edge of the Milky Way were chomped off of the smaller Sagittarius galaxy. But it’s not just Sagittarius who has reason to call the Milky Way a bad neighbor. According to Dr Keller, this is not the first time the Milky Way has nibbled on its neighbors. “Early in the life of the Milky Way galaxy mergers such as this occurred on a much more frequent basis, contributing substantially to the mass of the Milky Way,” Dr Keller said. “The devouring of the Sagittarius dwarf is like the after-dinner mint on top of what has been an extensive banquet for the Milky Way.” Forbes’ research was carried out in Canada as part of an Australian Research Council International Fellowship. More information: Accreted versus in situ Milky Way globular clusters, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.4289 Provided by Swinburne University of Technology

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Dwarf Galaxy Remnants Invading Milky Way

"Evolution in a Test Tube" -Scientists Create Immortal Genetic Molecule

Tom McFay — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:14:00 +0000

For the first time, scientists have synthesized RNA enzymes – ribonucleic acid enzymes also known as ribozymes – that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components.These simple nucleic acids can act as catalysts and continue the process indefinitely. “There’s nothing in biology in this system: no proteins, no cells, no biological matter. We just provide them with the building blocks,” said molecular biologist Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. “They’re just molecules, so they do what they do until they run out of substrate. And this will go for ever – it’s an immortal molecule, if you like,” he told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego. Since he and colleague Tracey Lincoln first succeeded in creating this artificial genetic system that can undergo self-sustained replication and evolution last year, the molecules have changed dramatically as they evolve better and better solutions. In the modern world, DNA carries the genetic sequence for advanced organisms, while RNA is dependent on DNA for performing its roles such as building proteins. But one prominent theory about the origins of life, called the RNA World model, postulates that because RNA can function as both a gene and an enzyme, RNA might have come before DNA and protein and acted as the ancestral molecule of life. However, the process of copying a genetic molecule, which is considered a basic qualification for life, appears to be exceedingly complex, involving many proteins and other cellular components. For years, researchers have wondered whether there might be some simpler way to copy RNA, brought about by the RNA itself. Some tentative steps along this road had previously been taken by the Joyce lab and others, but no one could demonstrate that RNA replication could be self-propagating, that is, result in new copies of RNA that also could copy themselves. A few years after Tracey Lincoln arrived at Scripps Research from Jamaica to pursue her Ph.D., she began exploring the RNA-only replication concept along with her advisor, Professor Gerald Joyce, M.D., Ph.D., who is also Dean of the Faculty at Scripps Research. Their work began with a method of forced adaptation known as in vitro evolution. The goal was to take one of the RNA enzymes already developed in the lab that could perform the basic chemistry of replication, and improve it to the point that it could drive efficient, perpetual self-replication. Lincoln synthesized in the laboratory a large population of variants of the RNA enzyme that would be challenged to do the job, and carried out a test-tube evolution procedure to obtain those variants that were most adept at joining together pieces of RNA. Ultimately, this process enabled the team to isolate an evolved version of the original enzyme that is a very efficient replicator, something that many research groups, including Joyce’s, had struggled for years to obtain. The improved enzyme fulfilled the primary goal of being able to undergo perpetual replication. “It kind of blew me away,” says Lincoln. The replicating system actually involves two enzymes, each composed of two subunits and each functioning as a catalyst that assembles the other. The replication process is cyclic, in that the first enzyme binds the two subunits that comprise the second enzyme and joins them to make a new copy of the second enzyme; while the second enzyme similarly binds and joins the two subunits that comprise the first enzyme. In this way the two enzymes assemble each other — what is termed cross-replication. To make the process proceed indefinitely requires only a small starting amount of the two enzymes and a steady supply of the subunits. “This is the only case outside biology where molecular information has been immortalized,” says Joyce. The researchers then generated a variety of enzyme pairs with similar capabilities. They mixed 12 different cross-replicating pairs, together with all of their constituent subunits, and allowed them to compete in a molecular test of survival of the fittest. Most of the time the replicating enzymes would breed true, but on occasion an enzyme would make a mistake by binding one of the subunits from one of the other replicating enzymes. When such “mutations” occurred, the resulting recombinant enzymes also were capable of sustained replication, with the most fit replicators growing in number to dominate the mixture. “To me that’s actually the biggest result,” says Joyce. The research shows that the system can sustain molecular information, a form of heritability, and give rise to variations of itself in a way akin to Darwinian evolution. So, says Lincoln, “What we have is non-living, but we’ve been able to show that it has some life-like properties, and that was extremely interesting.” The group is pursuing potential applications of their discovery in the field of molecular diagnostics, but that work is tied to a research paper currently in review, so the researchers can’t yet discuss it. But the main value of the work, according to Joyce, is at the basic research level. “What we’ve found could be relevant to how life begins, at that key moment when Darwinian evolution starts.” He is quick to point out that, while the self-replicating RNA enzyme systems share certain characteristics of life, they are not themselves a form of life. The historical origin of life can never be recreated precisely, so without a reliable time machine, one must instead address the related question of whether life could ever be created in a laboratory. This could, of course, shed light on what the beginning of life might have looked like, at least in outline. “We’re not trying to play back the tape,” says Lincoln of their work, “but it might tell us how you go about starting the process of understanding the emergence of life in the lab.” Joyce says that only when a system is developed in the lab that has the capability of evolving novel functions on its own can it be properly called life. “We’re knocking on that door,” he says, “But of course we haven’t achieved that.” Casey Kazan via Image is a representational composite only. The paper is titled “Self-sustained Replication of an RNA Enzyme,” and the work was supported by NASA and the National Institutes of Health, and the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology. http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3325/life-evolution-a-test-tube?page=0,1

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"Evolution in a Test Tube" -Scientists Create Immortal Genetic Molecule

Is Mars Between Ice Ages? (A Weekend Feature)

Tom McFay — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 09:00:00 +0000

“is not a dead planet -it undergoes climate changes that are even more pronounced than on Earth.” James Head of Brown University The prevailing thinking is that is a planet whose active climate has been confined to the distant past. About 3.5 billion years ago, the Red Planet had extensive flowing water and then fell quiet – deadly quiet. It didn’t seem the climate had changed much since. Recent studies however show that Mars’ climate has been much more dynamic than previously believed. After examining stunning high-resolution images taken last year by the Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers at Brown University documented for the first time that ice packs at least 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) thick and perhaps 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) thick existed along Mars’ mid-latitude belt as recently as 100 million years ago. In addition, the team believes other images tell them that glaciers flowed in localized areas in the last 10 to 100 million years – a blink of the eye in Mars’s geological timeline. This evidence of recent activity means the Martian climate may change again and could bolster speculation about whether the Red Planet can, or did, support life. “We’ve gone from seeing as a dead planet for three-plus billion years to one that has been alive in recent times,” said Jay Dickson, a research analyst in the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown and lead author. “[The finding] has changed our perspective from a planet that has been dry and dead to one that is icy and active.” In fact, Dickson and his co-authors, James Head, a planetary geologist, and David Marchant, an associate professor at Boston University, believe the images show that Mars has gone through multiple Ice Ages – episodes in its recent past in which the planet’s mid-latitudes were covered by glaciers that disappeared with changes in the Red Planet’s obliquity, which changes the climate by altering the amount of sunlight falling on different areas. NASA’s Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions provided evidence of a relatively recent ice age on Mars. In contrast to Earth’s ice ages, a Martian ice age expands when the poles warm, and water vapor is transported toward lower latitudes. Martian ice ages wane when the poles cool and lock water into polar icecaps. The catalysts of ice ages on appear to be much more extreme than the comparable drivers of climate change on Earth. Variations in the planet’s orbit and tilt produce remarkable changes in the distribution of water ice from Polar Regions down to latitudes equivalent to Houston or Egypt. Researchers, using NASA spacecraft data and analogies to Earth’s Antarctic Dry Valleys, reported their findings in the journal Nature. “Of all the solar system planets, has the climate most like that of Earth. Both are sensitive to small changes in orbital parameters,” said planetary scientist Dr. James Head of Brown University. “Now we’re seeing that Mars, like Earth, is in a period between ice ages,” he said. This evidence of recent activity means the Martian climate may change again and could bolster speculation about whether the Red Planet can, or did, support life. Head and his team examined global patterns of landscape shapes and near-surface water ice Nasa’s orbiters mapped. They concluded a covering of water ice mixed with dust mantled the surface of to latitudes as low as 30 degrees, and is degrading and retreating. By observing the small number of impact craters in those features and by backtracking the known patterns of changes in Mars’ orbit and tilt, they estimated the most recent ice age occurred just 400 thousand to 2.1 million years ago. Marchant, a glacial geologist who spent 17 field seasons in the Mars-like Antarctic Dry Valleys, said, “These extreme changes on Mars provide perspective for interpreting what we see on Earth. Landforms on that appear to be related to climate changes help us calibrate and understand similar landforms on Earth. Furthermore, the range of microenvironments in the Antarctic Dry Valleys helps us read the Mars record.” According to the researchers, during a Martian ice age, polar warming drives water vapor from polar ice into the atmosphere. The water comes back to ground at lower latitudes as deposits of frost or snow mixed generously with dust. This ice-rich mantle, a few meters thick, smooths the contours of the land. It locally develops a bumpy texture at human scales, resembling the surface of a basketball, and also seen in some Antarctic icy terrains. When ice at the top of the mantling layer sublimes back into the atmosphere, it leaves behind dust, which forms an insulating layer over remaining ice. On Earth, by contrast, ice ages are periods of polar cooling. The buildup of ice sheets draws water from liquid-water oceans, which lacks. Dickson and the other researchers focused on an area called Protonilus Mensae-Coloe Fossae. The region is located in Mars’s mid-latitude and is marked by splotches of mesas, massifs and steep-walled valleys that separate the lowlands in the north from the highlands in the south. The team looked in particular at a box canyon set in a low-lying plain. Images show the canyon has moraines – deposits of rocks that mark the limits of a glacier’s advance or the path of its retreat. The rock deposit lines appear to show a glacier that flowed up the box canyon, which “physically cannot happen,” Dickson said. Instead, the team deduced the ice in the surrounding plain grew higher than the canyon’s walls and then flowed downward onto the top of the canyon, which had become the lowest point on the ice-laden terrain. The team calculated the ice pack must have been one kilometer thick by past measurements of height between the plain and the lip of the canyon. Based on the ice flow patterns, the ice pack could have reached 2.5 kilometers at peak thickness during a period known as the late Amazonian, the authors said. The finding could have implications for the life-on-argument by strengthening the case for liquid water. Ice can melt two ways: by temperature or by pressure. As currently understood, the Martian climate is dominated by sublimation, the process by which solid substances are transformed directly to vapor. But ice packs can exert such strong pressure at the base to produce liquid water, which makes the thickness of past glaciers on its surface so intriguing. Dickson also looked at a lobe across the valley from the box canyon site. There, he saw a clear, semi-circular moraine that had spilled from an ancient tributary on to the surrounding plain. The lobe is superimposed on a past ice deposit and appears to be evidence of more recent glaciation. Although geologists can’t date either event, the landscape appears to show at least two periods in which glaciation occurred, bolstering their theory that the Martian climate has undergone past Ice Ages. Posted by Casey Kazan. Sources: http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2008/04/martian-glaciers http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2003/dec/HQ_03415_ice_age.html

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Is Mars Between Ice Ages? (A Weekend Feature)

Saturn’s Titan: Will It Prove to be a Living Lab on the Origins of Life? (A Weekend Feature)

Tom McFay — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 08:40:00 +0000

“Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material — it’s a giant factory of organic chemicals.” “We are carbon-based life, and understanding how far along the chain of complexity towards life that chemistry can go in an environment like Titan will be important in understanding the origins of life throughout the universe.” ~Ralph Lorenz -Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Saturn’s orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. Titan is a big laboratory where several of the world’s leading space scientists get to play with atmospheres on a planetary scale. At an eye popping minus 179 degrees Celsius (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit), Titan has a surface of liquid hydrocarbons in the form of methane and ethane with tholins believed to make up its dunes. The term “tholins,” coined by Carl Sagan in 1979, describe the complex organic molecules at the heart of prebiotic chemistry. Before the first Cassini Mission flyby’s Robert Brown who led Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) team, said: “We know VIMS will see through the haze to Titan’s surface. At closest approach – 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) – we’ll have 600-meter-pixel resolution. We’ll be able to see very small geologic features. We’ll get very high resolution looks at atmospheric phenomena, too. But from my perspective, the really important thing about this encounter is really digging down below the atmosphere and getting our first real glimpse of Titan geology. “We don’t know what we’re going to encounter there. I suppose you can assume we’ll see common geologic forms like mountains and craters and tectonic faults, maybe even volcanism.” Brown was spot on with his predictions. VIMS will see Titan’s hydrocarbon pools, if they exist and aren’t hidden by some low-lying fog or other strange phenomenon, Brown said Cassini’s Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) took a taste mysterious, subtle flavors in Titan’s atmosphere, team member and UA planetary sciences Professor Roger Yelle said, scooping up a breath of Titan’s puffy atmosphere during the flyby, The experiment measured how many molecules of different masses it got in the gulp of Titan’s mostly nitrogen, methane-laced atmosphere. Yelle and other Cassini scientists want to identify the big, complicated hydrogen-and-carbon-containing molecules because they are part of a planetary system that possibly rains methane and produces ethane ponds. Learning more about how carbon-containing, or “organic,” molecules form doesn’t explain how DNA came to be, Yelle said. “A single strand of DNA contains about 3 billion nucleotides that if stretched out, would be something like 1.7 meters long. We’re trying to understand molecules with just 10 or 12 atoms.” But Titan’s hydrocarbon chemistry holds clues that explain the very first steps of how nature assembled organic molecules, which are the precursors to amino acids, the building blocks of life, he said. Cassini to date has mapped about 20 percent of Titan’s surface with radar. Several hundred lakes and seas have been observed, with each of several dozen estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than Earth’s oil and gas reserves. Dark dunes that run along the equator contain a volume of organics several hundred times larger than Earth’s coal reserves. Proven reserves of natural gas on Earth total 130 billion tons, enough to provide 300 times the amount of energy the entire United States uses annually for residential heating, cooling and lighting. Dozens of Titan’s lakes individually have the equivalent of at least this much energy in the form of methane and ethane. “This global estimate is based mostly on views of the lakes in the northern polar regions. We have assumed the south might be similar, but we really don’t yet know how much liquid is there,” said Lorenz. Cassini’s radar has observed the south polar region only once, and only two small lakes were visible. Future observations of that area are planned during Cassini’s proposed extended mission. “We also know that some lakes are more than 10 meters or so deep because they appear literally pitch-black to the radar. If they were shallow we’d see the bottom, and we don’t,” said Lorenz. The question of how much liquid is on the surface is an important one because methane is a strong greenhouse gas on Titan as well as on Earth, but there is much more of it on Titan. If all the observed liquid on Titan is methane, it would only last a few million years, because as methane escapes into Titan’s atmosphere, it breaks down and escapes into space. If the methane were to run out, Titan could become much colder. Scientists believe that methane might be supplied to the atmosphere by venting from the interior in cryovolcanic eruptions. If so, the amount of methane, and the temperature on Titan, may have fluctuated dramatically in Titan’s past. A giant, glassy lake larger than Earth’s Lake Ontario occupies Titan’s south pole according to research from the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. The lake which covers 20,000 square kilometers is filled mostly with methane and ethane, hydrocarbons that are gases on Earth but liquid on the bone-freezing surface of Titan -the only solar system moon known to support a planet-like atmosphere. “We know the lake is liquid because it reflects essentially no light at 5-micron wavelengths,” Brown said. “It was hard for us to accept the fact that the feature was so black when we first saw it. More than 99.9 percent of the light that reaches the lake never gets out again. For it to be that dark, the surface has to be extremely quiescent, mirror smooth. No naturally produced solid could be that smooth.” Before the Cassini mission, several scientists thought that Titan would be awash in global oceans of ethane and other light hydrocarbons, the byproducts of photolysis, or the action of ultraviolet light on methane over 4.5 billion years of solar system history. But 40 close flybys of Titan by the Cassini spacecraft show no such oceans exist. Titan is also more squashed in its overall shape—like a rubber ball pressed down by a foot—than researchers had expected, said Howard Zebker, a Stanford geophysicist and electrical engineer involved in the work. The findings may help explain the presence of the large lakes of hydrocarbons at both of Titan’s poles, which have been puzzling researchers since being discovered in 2007. “Since the poles are squished in with respect to the equator, if there is a hydrocarbon ‘water table’ that is more or less spherical in shape, then the poles would be closer down to that water table and depressions at the poles would fill up with liquid,” Zebker said. The shape of the water table would be controlled by the gravitational field of Titan, which is still not fully understood. The next Cassini fly on August 25, 2009 in the spacecraft’s first close flyby of a moon since Saturn’s August 11 equinox. Highlights this time include a RADAR ’scrub’ to get more detailed views of the Shangri-La dunes, unique southern equatorial magnetosphere measurements, and an opportunity for high-resolution Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) observations of the southern hemisphere. Posted by Casey Kazan. Source Link: http://uanews.org/node/20615 Posted by Casey Kazan. Adapted from a Jet Propulsion Laboratory release. Recommended Post: Stephen Hawking: Why Isn’t the Milky Way “Crawling With Self-Designing Mechanical or Biological Life?” Link: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov