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Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. The simulation results made me think of Jojo's attempts to make a self-assembling space structure. Seems he may have been on the right track, just not thinking big enough

:-P Thanks Thijs... I do not agree with the premise of the article that a possible correlation of energy dissipation in living systems and their fitness means that one is the cause for the other - it may just be that both go hand-in-hand because of the nature of the world that we live in. Maybe there is such a drive for pre-biotic systems (like crystals and amino acids), but once life as we know it exists (i.e., heredity + mutation) it is hard to see the need for an amendment of Darwin's principles. The following just misses the essence of Darwin: "If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve." Darwin's principle in its simplest expression just says that if a genome is more effective at reproducing it is more likely to dominate the next generation. The beauty of it is that there is NO need for a steering mechanism (like maximize energy dissipation) any random set of mutations will still lead to an increase of reproductive effectiveness. BTW: what does "better at dissipating energy" even mean? If I run around all the time I will have more babies? Most species that prove to be very successful end up being very good at conserving energy: trees, turtles, worms. Even complexity of an organism is not a recipe for evolutionary success: jellyfish have been successful for hundreds of millions of years while polar bears are seem to be on the way out.

New research reported in San Diego on March 27 at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) provides further support for the idea that comets bombarding Earth billions of years ago carried and deposited the key ingredients for life to spring up on the planet. "Our research shows that the building blocks of life could, indeed, have remained intact despite the tremendous shock wave and other violent conditions in a comet impact," Blank said. "Comets really would have been the ideal packages for delivering ingredients for the chemical evolution thought to have resulted in life.

While most humans are right-handed, our proteins are made up of lefty molecules. In the same way your left and right hands mirror one another, molecules can assemble in two reflected structures. Life prefers the left-handed version, which is puzzling since both mirrored types form equally in the laboratory.

Let's start betting which party Aliens vote: GREEN, BLUE, RED, BLACK?

http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/ for the moment is down. My bet, the microbe they found notified its cousins and they are currently invading the US

you can still see the rest of it here: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html a good link with a summary and discussion on the announcement is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/02/nasa-life-form-bacteria-arsenic

Isn' it a candidate for Terraforming ?

Is there life on Mars? - We should try to compress those images!

"Is there life on Mars?" Yes, mostly on Saturday night...

University Alliance for Low Carbon Energy   Three universities, including Tsinghua University, University of Cambridge, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have fostered up an alliance on November 15, 2009 to advocate low carbon energy and climate change adaptation The alliance will mainly work on 6 major areas: clean coal technology and CCS, homebuilding energy efficiency, industrial energy efficiency and sustainable transport, biomass energy and other renewable energy, advanced nuclear energy, intelligent power grid, and energy policies/planning. A steering panel made up of the senior experts from the three universities (two from each) will be established to review, evaluate, and endorse the goals, projects, fund raising activities, and collaborations under the alliance. With the Headquarters at the campus of Tsinghua University and branch offices at other two universities, the alliance will be chaired by a scientist selected from Tsinghua University.   According to a briefing, the alliance will need a budget of USD 3-5 million, mainly from the donations of government, industry, and all walks of life. In this context, the R&D findings derived from the alliance will find its applications in improving people's life.

Understanding life is the scientific focus of the next Europa/Ganimede mission!

the objective is rather the study of "emergence of habitable worlds", which of course includes understanding of life and what habitability is ...

better information from the ESA site: http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=42291

"Her goal was to design and synthesise a super capacitor with increased energy density while maintaining power density and long cycle life. She designed, synthesised and characterised a novel core-shell nanorod electrode with hydrogemated TiO2(H-TiO2) core and polyaniline shell. H-TiO2 acts as the double layer electrostatic core. Good conductivity of H-TiO2 combined with the high pseudo capacitance of polyaniline results in significantly higher overall capacitance and energy density while retaining good power density and cycle life. This new electrode was fabricated into a flexible solid-state device to light an LED to test it in a practical application. Khare then evaluated the structural and electrochemical properties of the new electrode. It demonstrated high capacitance of 203.3 mF/cm2 (238.5 F/g) compared to the next best alternative super capacitor in previous research of 80 F/g, due to the design of the core-shell structure. This resulted in excellent energy density of 20.1 Wh/kg, comparable to batteries, while maintaining a high power density of 20540 W/kg. It also demonstrated a much higher cycle life compared to batteries, with a low 32.5% capacitance loss over 10,000 cycles at a high scan rate of 200 mV/s."

The only extraterrestrial life detection experiments ever conducted were the three which were components of the 1976 Viking Mission to Mars. Of these, only the Labeled Release experiment obtained a clearly positive response. [...] These analyses support the interpretation that the Viking LR experiment did detect extant microbial life on Mars.

...unless life arrived together with the nutrients...

Viking was one of the best sterilised sc we have ever launched! Just strange to read such an article published in an obscure Korean journal ...

"... although non-biological chemical reactions could also be behind the observations." Come on, everyone knows life is flourishing on Europa, not Titan.

As mentioned today during coffee .... we could think to link this to source localization

Really, you think they'd target such a low impact factor publication? ;-P

you will all soon be begging to publish in Acta Futura! We will be bigger than Nature.

wow, a big step in genomics...!

But isn't it just yet another word abuse? From what I understand, they just synthesised a genome identical to the one of an existing bacteria... while undoubtedly nice work, this is *very* far from "creating life from scratch"... The fact that you are able to copy something, doesn't mean you understand how it works...

well of course we are far from engineering specific functions, and this is just a copy of a function that already existed. However it is quite impressive and the first time it is done. And the challenge here is not really to "copy" the ADN, but the fact that it works... in other words it is not because you copy the ADN identically that the phenotype (traduction of the ADN) will be the same, which is the case in this experiment.

well a bit misleading title...

A lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life.

Scientific and speculative articles about the future of human evolution regarding to artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, transhumanism, nanotechnology, space colonization, time travel, life extension and human enhancement

like the idea ....