How Life got started on planet Earth is an important question to answer, because of the implications for Life in the wider Universe and prospects for Life here too. Several new findings have strengthened the view that Life’s particular architecture on this planet isn’t a contingent product of chance chemistry, but depends on intrinsic properties
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Titan is cold, so cold that bottled BBQ gas (methane & ethane) are liquid in lakes around its poles and it rains (pours really) the stuff periodically in regions closer to the equator. Methane-Ethane lakes on Titan (Credit: Copyright 2008 Karl Kofoed) But chemical disequilibrium, as found on Titan, is one pre-requisite for interesting long-chain
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A recent preprint by Charles Lineweaver & Marc Norman, of ANU, proposes that dwarf planets can be defined physically by the “Potato Radius” – the size at which gravity overcomes the strength of their constituent materials and makes them into a sphere. Why “Potato”? Because below that radius objects are often ellipsoids with three different
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Abstract | The first metazoa living in permanently anoxic conditions. Three species of multi-cellular eukaryote, phylum Loricifera, have been found in totally anoxic conditions. They have no mitochondria, instead replacing those oxygen-burning energy generators with endosymbionts that look a lot like hydrogenosomes, an organelle seen in unicellular lifeforms in anoxic conditions. Thus ‘complex’ life can
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Happy Valentine’s Day to all you loveable Blog-ghosts who read this page. I’ve been working on the dynamics of laser pushed reflectors – i.e. super-reflectors which can ‘reuse’ the beam thousands of times before it is absorbed and lost as heat. The concept was AFAIK originally discussed by Robert Metzger & Geoff Landis, but Young
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Two recent arXiv preprints discuss capture of Dark Matter and limits on its self-annihilation inside white dwarfs… Capture of Inelastic Dark Matter in White Dwarves Inelastic Dark Matter As An Efficient Fuel For Compact Stars …the first discusses limits for inelastic Dark Matter capture inside the white dwarfs of globular cluster M4, while the second
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Nick Lane is a prolific writer and has some very interesting pieces available at “New Scientist” as well as his own web-pages. Very readable work from a biochemist. Here’s a sampler from “New Scientist”… The Big O …not orgasm, but Oxygen and its variations through geological time. During the Carboniferous it was 35% of the
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Not the opener to “Voltron”, but the latest synthetic palaeo-news. First, appropriately enough, the first tracks of the First Crawling Things… Found: The first ever animal trails …reported by “New Scientist”, some rock-hounds have discovered 565 million year old anemone trails. Well… they look like anemone trails at least. Older ‘trackways’ are known, but they’re
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Brian Wang, at “Next Big Future”, reports on the conceptual ancestor of the ISV “Venturestar” from Giga-Movie “Avatar”. As he notes, the designer is Charles Pellegrino, long-time friend and colleague of James Cameron, and inventor, with Jim Powell, of the antimatter-propelled “Valkyrie” starship. Brian’s Post Valkyrie Starship at Pellegrino’s website Valkyrie at the BBC Archive
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