Laboratory Equipment

‘Sea Stalactites’ Provide Origin of Life Clues

Life on Earth may have originated not in warm tropical seas, but with weird tubes of ice — sometimes called “sea stalactites” — that grow downward into cold seawater near the Earth’s poles, scientists are reporting. Their article on these “brinicles” appears in ACS’ journal Langmuir.

Bruno Escribano and colleagues explain that scientists know surprisingly little about brinicles, which are hollow tubes of ice that can grow to several yards in length around streamers of cold seawater under pack ice. That’s because brinicles are difficult to study. The scientists set out to gather more information on the topic with an analysis of the growth process of brinicles.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/04/sea-stalactites-provide-origin-life-clues

Distant Planets Seem Ideal for Life

NASA’s planet-hunting telescope has discovered two planets that seem like ideal places for some sort of life to flourish. And they are just the right size and in just the right place. One is toasty, the other nippy.

The distant duo are the best candidates for habitable planets that astronomers have found so far, says William Borucki, the chief scientist for NASA’s Kepler telescope. And it’s got astronomers thinking that similar planets that are just about right for life — “Goldilocks planets” — might be common in the universe.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/04/distant-planets-seem-ideal-life

Titan’s Chemistry Prime to Form Building Blocks of Life

A laboratory experiment at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, simulating the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan, suggests complex organic chemistry that could eventually lead to the building blocks of life extends lower in the atmosphere than previously thought. The results now point out another region on the moon that could brew up prebiotic materials. The paper was published in Nature Communications this week.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/04/titan%E2%80%99s-chemistry-prime-form-building-blocks-life

Scientist of the Week: Avi Loeb

HarvardEvery Thursday, Laboratory Equipment features a Scientist of the Week, chosen from the science industry’s latest headlines. This week’s scientist is Avi Loeb from Harvard Univ. He and a team are looking to dying stars in a search for evidence of alien life.

The original article is here: www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/02/dying-stars-become-target-alien-life-search

He speaks about his work here: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/03/scientist-week-avi-loeb

Have a question for Avi Loeb? Let us know and we’ll pass it on!

New Information About ‘Snowball Earth’ Period

It is rather difficult to imagine, but approximately 635 million years ago, ice may have covered a vast portion of our planet in an event called “Snowball Earth.” According to the Snowball Earth hypothesis, the massive ice age that occurred before animal life appeared, when Earth’s landmasses were most likely clustered near the equator, precipitated relatively rapid changes in atmospheric conditions and a subsequent greenhouse heat wave. This particular period of extensive glaciation and subsequent climate changes might have supplied the cataclysmic event that gave rise to modern levels of atmospheric oxygen, paving the way for the rise of animals and the diversification of life during the later Cambrian explosion.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/03/new-information-about-snowball-earth-period

Comets May Have Sparked Life on Earth

It’s among the most ancient of questions: what are the origins of life on Earth? A new experiment simulating conditions in deep space reveals that the complex building blocks of life could have been created on icy interplanetary dust and then carried to Earth, jump-starting life.

Chemists from UC Berkeley, and the Univ. of Hawaii, Manoa, showed that conditions in space are capable of creating complex dipeptides – linked pairs of amino acids – that are essential building blocks shared by all living things. The discovery opens the door to the possibility that these molecules were brought to Earth aboard a comet or possibly meteorites, catalyzing the formation of proteins (polypeptides), enzymes and even more complex molecules, such as sugars, that are necessary for life.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/03/comets-may-have-sparked-life-earth

Oldest Dogs to Boost Research on Successful Aging

Experts agree that discovering the secrets to successful aging will demand a sustained effort using innovative scientific approaches. Now a research veterinarian is betting that the oldest pet dogs living among us can shed light on a surer scientific path to discovering the secrets of successful aging and cancer resistance.

This week marks the launch of The Old Grey Muzzle Tour 2013, a cross-country scientific expedition by David Waters, DVM, to study 12 of the oldest-living Rottweilers in their homes. The trek begins in Homer, Alaska, and will finish April 12 in West Lafayette, Ind.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/03/oldest-dogs-boost-research-successful-aging

Toxic Oceans Delayed Spread Complex LifeA new model suggests that inhospitable hydrodgen-sulphide rich waters could have delayed the spread of complex life forms in ancient oceans.

The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, considers the composition of the oceans 550-700 million years ago and shows that oxygen-poor toxic conditions, which may have delayed the establishment of complex life, were controlled by the biological availability of nitrogen.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/03/toxic-oceans-delayed-spread-complex-life

New Life Forms Expected from Deep Sea Study

Researchers steering a remote-controlled submarine around the world’s deepest known hydrothermal vents have collected numerous samples from sunless depths of the Caribbean Sea where blazing hot, mineral-rich fluid gushes from volcanic chimneys that look like gnarled tree stumps.

Jon Copley, chief scientist for the expedition of Britain’s National Oceanography Centre, says he believes that laboratory analysis in the coming months will reveal some new life forms that have evolved in the pitch-black vent areas of the Cayman Trough, more than 3 miles below the sea’s surface between the Cayman Islands and Jamaica.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/02/new-life-forms-expected-deep-sea-study

Dying Stars Become Target for Alien Life Search

Even dying stars could host planets with life – and if such life exists, astronomers might be able to detect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf’s planet much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star.

“In the quest for extraterrestrial biological signatures, the first stars we study should be white dwarfs,” said Avi Loeb, theorist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/02/dying-stars-become-target-alien-life-search

Molecules that Assemble in Water Hint at Origins of Life

The base pairs that hold together two pieces of RNA, the older cousin of DNA, are some of the most important molecular interactions in living cells. Many scientists believe that these base pairs were part of life from the very beginning and that RNA was one of the first polymers of life. But there is a problem. The RNA bases don’t form base pairs in water unless they are connected to a polymer backbone, a trait that has baffled origin-of-life scientists for decades. If the bases don’t pair before they are part of polymers, how would the bases have been selected out from the many molecules in the “prebiotic soup” so that RNA polymers could be formed?

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/02/molecules-assemble-water-hint-origins-life

Scientists Study Rocks in Search of Alien Life

Scientists at the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison are helping search for evidence of alien life not by looking into outer space, but by studying some rocks right here on Earth.

Some of the rocks are up to 3.5 billion years old. The scientists are looking for crucial information to understand how life might have arisen elsewhere in the universe and guide the search for life on Mars one day.

“There’s a story always hidden in rocks,” says geoscientist Clark Johnson, the lead investigator for the Wisconsin Astrobiology Research Consortium. “… It’s up to (geologists) to be clever enough to find the tools that we need to interrogate those rocks to find what story they preserve.”

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/02/scientists-study-rocks-search-alien-life