Volcanic lightning may have sparked life on Earth

A classic experiment exploring the origin of life has, more than a half-century later, yielded new results.

In 1953, Stanley L. Miller, then a graduate student of Harold C. Urey at the University of Chicago, put ammonia, methane and hydrogen — the gases believed to be in early Earth’s atmosphere — along with water in a sealed flask and applied electrical sparks to simulate the effects of lightning. A week later, amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, were generated out of the simple molecules.

Enshrined in high school textbooks, the Miller-Urey experiment raised expectations that scientists could unravel the origins of life with simple chemistry experiments.

The excitement has long since subsided. The amino acids never grew into the more complex proteins. Scientists now think the composition of air on early Earth was much different from what Dr. Miller used, leading some to question whether the Miller-Urey experiment had any relevance to the still unsolved problem of the origin of life.

After Dr. Miller’s death in May last year, Dr. Jeffrey L. Bada of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, who had been one of Dr. Miller’s graduate students, discovered cardboard boxes containing hundreds of vials of dried residues collected from the experiments conducted in 1953 and 1954.

Consulting Dr. Miller’s notebooks, Dr. Bada discovered that Dr. Miller had constructed two variations of the original apparatus. One simply used a different spark generator. The second injected steam onto the sparks.

That caught Dr. Bada’s attention, because the addition of steam seemed to replicate what might have existed in lagoons and tidal pools around volcanoes.

This spring, Adam P. Johnson, a graduate student at Indiana University who was visiting Dr. Bada’s laboratory on an internship, jumped on the opportunity to work on the vials produced by an experiment he had read about in high school textbooks, although the historic material did not look remarkable. “There were just a brown residue at the bottom of a old vial,” Mr. Johnson said.

In his 1953 paper, Dr. Miller reported that he had detected five amino acids produced by the original apparatus. Mr. Johnson’s work, using modern techniques, revealed small amounts of nine additional amino acids in those samples. In the residues from the apparatus with the steam injector, the scientists detected 22 amino acids including 10 that had never been identified before from the Miller-Urey experiment. … – nyt

… Jeffrey Bada of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California and colleagues re-analysed the original 50-year-old samples left by Stanley Miller of the University of Chicago, in 1953 and 1954. His was the first experiment ever to produce amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, from inorganic molecules and a spark of electricity.

Bada’s team discovered more organic molecules than Miller had been able to detect, and also showed that a secondary experiment – one that Miller carried out but never published – offers the best clue to how life on Earth began some 4 billion years ago.  …

One criticism of Miller’s experiment is that he got the atmosphere of early Earth slightly wrong. The new discoveries could give it a second life. The conditions in Miller’s flasks may not replicate the ones covering the entire surface of Earth, but they could have been found in small regions around the planet. According to Bada, Miller’s gases could have been spat out by the many volcanoes that dotted the planet at the time.

All that would then be needed is electricity – and many large volcanic eruptions are accompanied by spectacular lightning. This was the case, for instance, when the Chaitén volcano in Chile erupted for the first time in 9000 years in May 2008 (see image, right).

“Instead of Darwin’s warm little pond being the entire ocean, the warm little pond could have consisted of volcanic island tide pools and lagoons,” says Bada.

Why would the bit of extra steam in the volcanic apparatus make such a great difference? One possible explanation is that the steam pushes newly formed amino acids away from the sparks before they are able to react further and form other compounds.

“This is an exciting result leading toward greater understanding of how life might have arisen on Earth,” says Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

The findings could also give clues to life on other planets- ns

Gamma Ray Telescope Finds First “Invisible” Pulsar

A pulsar that had previously been invisible to orbiting and ground-based observatories has been discovered thanks to one of astronomy’s newest pairs of “glasses,” the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. A pulsar is a type of neutron star, the small, dense remnant of a massive star that exploded as a supernova.

Unlike ordinary neutron stars, pulsars send out jets of radiation from their magnetic poles that sweep across Earth’s line of sight as the star spins on its axis.

The newfound pulsar, which sits 4,600 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus, rotates at about a million miles an hour, and its beam of gamma rays reaches Earth about three times a second.

Fermi, a collaboration between NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy, and international partners, was launched in June to scan the skies for gamma rays, the most energetic wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum.

Pulsars have been spotted before based on radio waves and x-rays, but the new pulsar is the first object ever found solely based on gamma rays, according to Fermi scientists.

“We’re learning that the Fermi telescope is the perfect instrument for finding young pulsars that were hidden from us before,” said Alice Harding, a co-author on the study and a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Harding said the mission could discover a new class of previously invisible pulsars, identify the mysterious sources of so-called gamma ray bursts, and expand estimates of the number of supernovae in our galaxy. … – natgeo

FBI was told to blame Anthrax scare on Al Qaeda by White House officials

In the immediate aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, White House officials repeatedly pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by Al Qaeda, but investigators ruled that out, the Daily News has learned.

After the Oct. 5, 2001, death from anthrax exposure of Sun photo editor Robert Stevens, Mueller was “beaten up” during President Bush’s morning intelligence briefings for not producing proof the killer spores were the handiwork of terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, according to a former aide.

“They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East,” the retired senior FBI official told The News.

On October 15, 2001, President Bush said, “There may be some possible link” to Bin Laden, adding, “I wouldn’t put it past him.” Vice President Cheney also said Bin Laden’s henchmen were trained “how to deploy and use these kinds of substances, so you start to piece it all together.”

But by then the FBI already knew anthrax spilling out of letters addressed to media outlets and to a U.S. senator was a military strain of the bioweapon. “Very quickly [Fort Detrick, Md., experts] told us this was not something some guy in a cave could come up with,” the ex-FBI official said. “They couldn’t go from box cutters one week to weapons-grade anthrax the next. – dailynews

If you look at the details, like the White house starting to take Cipro to protect against anthrax on 9/11, the anthrax letters framing Al Qaeda, the fact that Bruce Irvins, who the FBI says sent the anthrax, was deeply involved in the 9/11 investigation … you start to smell an obvious rat. Can you imagine Mueller saying to Cheney that Americans are just not THAT stupid? Cover stories have to be at least a LITTLE consistent.

See my previous post on this topic.

Legal case against God dismissed

A US judge has thrown out a case against God, ruling that because the defendant has no address, legal papers cannot be served.

The suit was launched by Nebraska state senator Ernie Chambers, who said he might appeal against the ruling.

He sought a permanent injunction to prevent the “death, destruction and terrorisation” caused by God.

Judge Marlon Polk said in his ruling that a plaintiff must have access to the defendant for a case to proceed.

“Given that this court finds that there can never be service effectuated on the named defendant this action will be dismissed with prejudice,” Judge Polk wrote in his ruling.

Mr Chambers cannot refile the suit but may appeal.

‘God knows everything’

Mr Chambers sued God last year. He said God had threatened him and the people of Nebraska and had inflicted “widespread death, destruction and terrorisation of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants”.

He said he would carefully consider Judge Polk’s ruling before deciding whether to appeal.

The court, Mr Chambers said, had acknowledged the existence of God and “a consequence of that acknowledgement is a recognition of God’s omniscience”.

“Since God knows everything,” he reasoned, “God has notice of this lawsuit.”

Mr Chambers, a state senator for 38 years, said he filed the suit to make the point that “anyone can sue anyone else, even God”. – bbc

‘Stayin’ Alive’ has near-perfect rhythm to help jump-start heart

“Stayin’ Alive” might be more true to its name than the Bee Gees ever could have guessed: At 103 beats per minute, the old disco song has almost the perfect rhythm to help jump-start a stopped heart.

In a small but intriguing study from the University of Illinois medical school, doctors and students maintained close to the ideal number of chest compressions doing CPR while listening to the catchy, sung-in-falsetto tune from the 1977 movie “Saturday Night Fever.”

The American Heart Association recommends 100 chest compressions per minute, far more than most people realize, study author Dr. David Matlock of the school’s Peoria, Illinois, campus said Thursday. … “Stayin’ Alive” work wonders in classes where students were having trouble keeping the right beat while practicing on mannequins. When he turned on the song, “all of a sudden, within just a few seconds, they get it right on the dot.”"I don’t know how the Bee Gees knew this,” Nadkarni said. “They probably didn’t. But they just hit upon this natural rhythm that was very catchy, very popular, that helps us do the right thing.” – cnn

Black Triangle Irish UFO with Red Laser Hoax video