More Asteroids Could Have Made Life's Ingredients

ScienceDaily for January 19, 2011 reported on amino acids in asteroids.

Amino acids are used to build proteins, which are used by life to make structures like hair and nails, and to speed up or regulate chemical reactions. Amino acids come in two varieties that are mirror images of each other, like your hands. Life on Earth uses the left-handed kind exclusively. Since life based on right-handed amino acids would presumably work fine, scientists are trying to find out why Earth-based life favored left-handed amino acids.

Scientists Construct Synthetic Proteins That Sustain Life

ScienceDaily for January 7, 2011 reported on the development of synthetic proteins.

The team of researchers created genetic sequences never before seen in nature, and the scientists showed that they can produce substances that sustain life in cells almost as readily as proteins produced by nature's own toolkit.

Building Blocks of Life Created in "Impossible" Place

style="font-style: italic;">NASA Science News for December 15, 2010 reported on amino acids found in a meteorite.

"This meteorite formed when two asteroids collided," said Dr. Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "The shock of the collision heated it to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough that all complex organic molecules like amino acids should have been destroyed, but we found them anyway." Glavin is lead author of a paper on this discovery appearing December 15 in Meteoritics and Planetary Science. "Finding them in this type of meteorite suggests that there is more than one way to make amino acids in space, which increases the chance for finding life elsewhere in the Universe."

Trace Amounts of Water Created Oceans on Earth and Other Terrestrial Planets, Study Suggests

ScienceDaily for December 20, 2010 reported on a theory of how oceans came into being on the earth.

But a recent study by an MIT planetary scientist suggests that the planetesimals themselves provided the water that created oceans. As Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the Mitsui Career Development Assistant Professor of Geology in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, reports in a recent paper in Astrophysics and Space Science, these planetesimals contained trace amounts of water -- at least .01 to .001 percent of their total mass (scientists don't know the precise size of planetesimals, but they estimate that those that created Earth were between hundreds and thousands of kilometers in diameter). In the paper, Elkins-Tanton says it is likely that even tiny amounts of water in the planetesimals could create steam atmospheres that later cooled and condensed into liquid oceans on terrestrial planets.

Miniature Human Livers Created in the Lab

ScienceDaily for October 31, 2010 reported on a liver that was grown in a lab.

Researchers at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center have reached an early, but important, milestone in the quest to grow replacement livers in the lab. They are the first to use human liver cells to successfully engineer miniature livers that function -- at least in a laboratory setting -- like human livers. The next step is to see if the livers will continue to function after transplantation in an animal model.

Haze on Saturn's Moon Titan May Hold Ingredients for Life

ScienceDaily for October 8, 2010 reported on the atmosphere of Saturn's moon, Titan.

The results suggest not only that Titan's atmosphere could be a reservoir of prebiotic molecules that serve as the springboard to life, but they offer a new perspective on the emergence of terrestrial life as well: Instead of coalescing in a primordial soup, the first ingredients of life on our planet may have rained down from a primordial haze high in the atmosphere.

Water Discovered on Second Asteroid, May Be Even More Common

ScienceDaily for October 7, 2010 reported on water and ice found in an asteroid.

"This discovery suggests that this region of our solar system contains more water ice than anticipated," said University of Central Florida Professor Humberto Campins. "And it supports the theory that asteroids may have hit Earth and brought our planet its water and the building blocks for life to form and evolve here."