science

The origin of Life

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Whenever engaged in a debate with believers a common question that often arises is, “How do you explain life, what started it all?”

OK then, lets step back see where we are today. To start off, here is an interesting article on the origin of life on The Daily Galaxy here …

It’s paradoxical that as our leading microbiologists look to create the building blocks of life in Earth-bound labs, our Universe is alive with the building blocks for DNA and RNA. The giant gas nebula in outer space are rife with sugars that form ribose –the backbone of RNA. There’s no rational reason why the system of DNA and RNA that shaped life on Earth should be limited to our remote biosphere.

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Yuri Gagarin

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The Google logo declares that today is the day.  Exactly 50 years ago on 12th April 1961 he became the first human to journey into outer space when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth.

To help with a bit of an insight, his elder daughter Elena gave her first ever interview about her father to Andrea Rose of the British Council. This is the complete transcript. Here are a couple of surprising details …

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Good Science Journalism – “The Tevatron goes bump” by Jon Butterworth

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Jon Butterworth has written an article in today’s Guardian that is truly a fabulous piece. I applaud it, not simply because of the pure facts, but also because he has demonstrated scientific integrity at its very best. First, the core of the story itself is this … This week the CDF experiment at the Tevatron … Read more

Newly Discovered Asteroid Is Earth’s Companion

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Astronomers from the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland have found that a recently discovered asteroid has been following Earth in its motion around the Sun for at least the past 250,000 years, and may be intimately related to the origin of our planet.

Details are here on the Royal Astronomical Scciety website.

Their work appears in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

The asteroid first caught the eye of the scientists, Apostolos “Tolis” Christou and David Asher, two months after it was found by the WISE infrared survey satellite, launched in 2009 by the United States. “Its average distance from the Sun is identical to that of the Earth,” says Dr Christou, “but what really impressed me at the time was how Earth-like its orbit was.” Most near-Earth Asteroids — NEAs for short — have very eccentric, or egg-shaped, orbits that take the asteroid right through the inner solar system. But the new object, designated 2010 SO16, is different. Its orbit is almost circular so that it cannot come close to any other planet in the solar system except Earth.

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New branches on the tree of life

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Now this is simply fascinating to me, and hopefully to you as well. Venter, Eisen and colleagues report in the journal Public Library of Science One that they have analysed marine DNA and discovered genes that look quite different from any seen before. To clarify, the tree of life, as we know it was basically … Read more

Venter vs Joyce

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Apparently US geneticist Craig Venter is being slapped down (legally) by the estate of James Joyce!!! To clarify, thats the very dead James Joyce, the Irish Writer. So what the heck did Venter do to offend the dead? Easy, he created new life, and then stamped the DNA with a quote from Joyce’s semi-autobiographical 1916 … Read more