Well, the answer depends on what we mean by the “origin of life”. One could say that it all started 13.8 billion years ago with the birth of the universe – the “shock and awe” process we call the Big Bang. The impetus that kick-started the processes which led to primitive life-forms may have come from the seeding of our planet with molecules such as amino acids on asteroids, comets, stardust, or other cosmic bodies crashing into our young planet. Perhaps, the jolt to bring inanimate abiotic molecules together to form the precursors to biological molecules could have come from lighting strikes. This process of prebiotic synthesis was first experimentally tested back in 1952 by a graduate student Stanley Miller.
The now famous Miller-Urey experiment was an impressive attempt to show that it was possible to synthesis life’s building blocks by simulating conditions of the early Earth. With nothing more than hydrogen, water, methane and ammonia, Miller was able prepare a concoction of amino acids – the building blocks of everything alive on Earth. Continue reading “Did life originate with a bang?”→
It happens at least once every month. Sometimes, rarely, it happens twice a month. It’s when lunatics roam the streets and when drivers get distracted by what they see up there in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s a FULL MOON.
Yesterday, inspired by the beautiful sight of the Moon outside my window and soon after reading Thomas’s post about impact craters on the different hemispheres of the Moon, I wanted to find out if there were others around the world who were also thinking about the Moon. It turned out there were lots of people tweeting about the Moon (hashtag analysis suggested atleast hundreds of tweets per hour). Historical statistics suggested the around this time of each month, the webosphere goes wild about the Moon and so I began digger deeper. I plotted data from Google Trends and noticed how periodic peaks in searches for the keywords “Big Moon” coincided with the days around a full moon. Over the last few years, since social media took over the world, annual Supermoon events sparked the most interest with about 4 times as many Google searches than a typical day in the year.
Last Saturday, Prime Minister-elect Tony Abbott emphatically declared “Australia is under new management”. Since then, he has been briefed by a multitude of senior bureaucrats in Canberra. Apart from getting acquainted with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, our new PM has met the heads of Treasury and Finance, and the chiefs of the Defence Force and Department of Foreign Affairs. But what about the head of Department of Industry, Innovation, Climate Change, Science, Research and Tertiary Education? It seems like the PM-designate hasn’t yet sought* a briefing from this super-department… and that disturbs me. So is there anything we can do about it? Continue reading “Earth seeks new management”→
In today’s post, I was planning to tell you all about my trip in the last few weeks to Germany where I attended the 63rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. This was an incredible opportunity to be inspired by 34 Nobel Laureates, discuss the latest in science and it’s role in our society, and meet other passionate early-career researchers from around the world. However, I would like to share some of the highlights from lectures at the meeting in this post, which are currently being processed by the media technicians at the meeting and so my post on my experiences at Lindau will happen at a later date (soon, I hope).
Instead, today I’d like to share with you a video that caught my attention last week as it offers stunning visuals that highlight the complexity and beauty of the Earth’s climate system. The 11-minute video, worthy I think of a re-post in our blog, was created by folks at the Youtube channel SpaceRip using material created at NASA from satellite observations. It is a good demonstration of how effective visuals can be to communicate science but also do interesting science by picking out signals which only become apparent when the datasets are viewed at different scales in time and space.
I encourage you to view the video in high resolution on your computer and share it with others. Then read this Scienctific American blog post for clarification of the science presented within the video by Eric Snodgrass (Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).
We begin this week with what might seem to be a collection of random videos and stories that lead us from earthly elements to stellar spectacles. Individually, they are all interesting but there is also a common thread… Can you identify the “periodic” feature in all the stories?
The NEW Periodic Table Song (In Order)
You have probably heard the Elements song by Tom Lehrer or heard a rendition of that song by Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter). There have been a number of other interesting takes on it but this new attempt by ASAP SCIENCE to sing the Period Table in order of the elements for the 21st century audience is awesome!
I have always wondered if there will ever be a day when we shall be able to control time and space. You know, fast forward things we experience, then slow them down… Zoom into our world and then zoom back out simply with a two-finger pinch? For the time being at least, such control of our everyday experience seems to be in the realms of science fiction. But I recently discovered three new web-based visualization apps that can give us a feel for how useful such control would be for scientists.
Microbes make the world go round. There are more microbial cells on you and in you, than your own cells – in fact 99% of them are not human! Some members of our microbiome enable us to digest the food we eat while others play an essential role in maintaining our immune system that fights off other pathogenic microbes. They are central to biogeochemical cycles of elements such as carbon and nitrogen and they have been doing so for billions of years. Long story short – you and I wouldn’t be alive without them!
Checkout the video Seven Wonders of the Microbial World if you want to find out more about the tiny critters that we depend on. Today, we pay homage to our most valued cousins – by talking to them!
Habemus Papam et Deus Particular – We have a Pope and the God particle.
The news bears an eerie likeness to Dan Brown’s plot in Angels and Demons.
Last week two important events took place. In the Vatican, the College of Cardinals were guided by the Holy Spirit (or so the legend goes) to choose Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the new Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. As the world learned more about Pope Francis (who as it turns out is a chemistry graduate), not far from Rome, in La Thuile in Italy, physicists upped the ante. Guided by results from the Large Hadron Collider, the physicists announced they were now sure that they had found the God particle.
So what? Well, in one meeting men dressed in red gowns chose a new direction for their institution. In the other meeting, men and women, some in suits, others in jeans, proclaimed it was time to move on to the next stage of understanding the universe we live in. As this is a science blog, let’s look at the latter news in more detail. Continue reading “A new Pope and a new particle – is it déjà vu?”→
Shortly the Earth will begin to disintegrate, or will explode from the inside out, or will get hammered by something from space, or will erupt and shake itself to pieces (not to mention the zombie plague) so it seems like a good time to reflect on the first year of our blog.
The magnificent Kelly Strzepek, blog founder extraordinaire kicked off the blog with a post on her midterm in December last year. Since then, she has blogged her way to Antarctica and back, shared the highs and lows of life as a PhD student, filled us in on countless new scientific discoveries, and some not so scientific ones…
We’ve also been brought on a journey by Nick, who has walked us through his PhD, posting about his stalagmite’s journey from a cave, to a rock saw, to the polisher, to the mill, to the weighing room, and (finally) to the mass spec… still using the mass spec… WORK DAMN IT!!
In recent days, Curiosity has been busy with self-inspections and calibration of its instrument suite. It has clocked about 150 meters and continues to work in good health.
You might have already seen some photos of the red planet from this or past missions but prepare to be amazed by this impressive panorama.
The Mars Science Laboratory might only sport a 2 Mega Pixel camera (so that it can send it photos in a reasonable time frame back to Earth), but thanks to the clever people at NASA and photographers like Andrew Bodrov, we can get a taste for what it might be like to stand on Mars and look around.
Ladies and gentlemen, NASA has turned on the Fasten Seat Belt sign as we approach Gale Crater on Mars. Weather conditions remain within seasonal norms with the skies being dominated by diffuse water ice clouds.
If you haven’t already done so, please cancel all your appointments on 6th August. Please take your computer and browse to http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/. Make sure your chair and table are in a comfortable position and hold-on tight!
If you are in a city with a space centre or university with a planetary science department, please read carefully the special instructions located here. If you are unable to reach a public event, make sure you have a good internet connection and follow the event at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/ or on NASA TV.
Every 4 years, the Olympics bring us together to witness the best in
human endurance, athleticism and sportsmanship. This week as medals are won and each country’s tally grows, there is one team that has its sights on a prize outside this world.
They have trained for years, learnt from past exploration missions, used the latest and some of the most remarkable innovative technologies and perfected instruments to excellence. Now they wait for their dream machine to perform what it was built for – land on the Red planet and do science.
If you are in Canberra, why not immerse yourself in a once in lifetime event at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex and be amongst the first to know when the signals from the spacecraft are received at the Tidbinbilla Tracking Station.
If you are elsewhere in the world, checkout events in your city or join online at NASA TV. Curiosity will land near the Martian equator about 3:30pm in Canberra (15:31 Aug. 6 AEST ; 22:31 Aug. 5 PDT). Coverage begins about two hours before landing.
NASA engineers have performed the final trajectory correction that MSL is likely to need to enable a successful targeted landing at Gale Crater. If the success of Spirit and Opportunity, the Mars Exploration Rovers that began exploring Mars in 2004 are anything to go by, NASA engineers are expected to out-perform expectations. Let’s wish them the very best and hope the landing goes to plan.
In the meantime, the scientists have begun sharpening their pencils (if they still use them!) and clearing out their emails. They are getting ready for the data stream from the red planets to come through. Thanks to the way Curiosity is packaged up, it is primed to begin science operations almost as soon as it lands.
4th of July 2012, a date which will live in infamy, at least for the physicists amongst us. It was the day when the ‘God particle’ gained its independence from the realm of the unknown and could no longer be called the god-damn particle! I have been wondering if the discovery of the Higgs Boson could help astrobiologists find life elsewhere…
Chances are that you’ve already heard about the announcement of the observation of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. In fact, you might have heard about it so many times on different blogs and news stories that you could be forgiven if you thought Apple was launching a new revolutionary device called Higgs Boson!
The story started in the 1960s when Peter Higgs and others proposed the mechanism by which elementary particles such as quarks (that make up neutrons and protons) gain mass by interacting with the Higgs field that permeated all space soon after the Big Bang and continues to do so today. According to the standard model, all quantum fields have a fundamental particle associated with them, and so it was expected that Higgs field should also be associated with a particle – the Higgs particle.
As a test for the standard model, over many years scientists have attempted to find the particle that mediated the Higgs mechanism but it remained elusive, earning it the nickname the ‘goddamn particle’ (which for sake of politeness became the God particle, and the name stuck). However, a concerted effort by scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider finally led to its detection which culminated in the announcement of the preliminary results last week. The discovery immediately validated the Standard Model and excluded technicolor theories of particle physics.
We can thank the Higgs particle for making astrobiologists. Without the Higgs, the universe would be a very different place. For one, if we did not have the Higgs particle, all matter that is made of neutrons, protons and electrons would not be able to form chemical bonds. In other words: no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no life on Earth, no humans, no astrobiologists. Continue reading “Could Higgs help us find life elsewhere?”→
In exactly 1 month, we will be treated to one of the most exhilarating rides in the solar system. Curiosity (The Mars Science Laboratory) may have had a pretty long journey since its launch last year but the hardest, most dangerous part is yet come…