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TOPIC: Alien life


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RE: Alien life
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Title: From plasma crystals and helical structures towards inorganic living matter
Authors: V N Tsytovich, G E Morfill, V E Fortov, N G Gusein-Zade, B A Klumov and S V Vladimirov

Complex plasmas may naturally self-organize themselves into stable interacting helical structures that exhibit features normally attributed to organic living matter. The self-organization is based on non-trivial physical mechanisms of plasma interactions involving over-screening of plasma polarization. As a result, each helical string composed of solid microparticles is topologically and dynamically controlled by plasma fluxes leading to particle charging and over-screening, the latter providing attraction even among helical strings of the same charge sign. These interacting complex structures exhibit thermodynamic and evolutionary features thought to be peculiar only to living matter such as bifurcations that serve as 'memory marks', self-duplication, metabolic rates in a thermodynamically open system, and non-Hamiltonian dynamics. We examine the salient features of this new complex 'state of soft matter' in light of the autonomy, evolution, progenity and autopoiesis principles used to define life. It is concluded that complex self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space provided certain conditions allow them to evolve naturally.

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Panspermia
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Recent probes inside comets show it is overwhelmingly likely that life began in space, according to a new research paper by Cardiff scientists.
Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe and colleagues at the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology have long argued the case for panspermia the theory that life began inside comets and then spread to habitable planets across the galaxy. A recent BBC Horizon documentary traced the development of the theory.
Now the team claims that findings from space probes sent to investigate passing comets reveal how the first organisms could have started.

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RE: Alien life
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Could alien life exist in the form of dancing specks of dust? According to a new simulation, electrically charged dust can organise itself into DNA-like double helixes that behave in many ways like living organisms, reproducing and passing on information to one another.

"This came as a bit of a surprise to us" - Gregor Morfill of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany. He and colleagues have built a computer simulation to model what happens to dust immersed in an ionised gas, or plasma.

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For the first time, there is solid data to refute a popular theory that life came to Earth aboard a comet, Rutgers researchers say.
Deteriorated DNA from microbes, frozen for millions of years in the Antarctic ice, shows that organisms could not have survived the bombardment of cosmic radiation during deep space travel from outside the solar system, said Paul Falkowski, a Rutgers biologist and oceanographer.

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Humans cannot possibly be related to any intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, a new scientific study has found.
There is a theory that life on Earth began when a comet carrying frozen micro-organisms crashed on this planet.
But researchers in the US found cosmic radiation had killed off the DNA of microbes - retrieved from Antarctic glaciers - that were older than 1.1 million years. This would mean comets would effectively be sterilised as they travelled across the vastness of outer space and that any life in solar systems across the universe must have originated independently.
The scientists found microbes younger than 1.1 million years were able to come back to life, but this period is too short to make the journey from one solar system to another.

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If we encountered alien life, would we recognize it? I don't mean large, ambulatory, tentacle-snapping organisms with eyeballs on the ends of stalks. Those are always obvious. I'm talking about the low-key, chilled-out microscopic life-forms that might be lurking below the surface of Mars, or beneath the crust of one of Jupiter's jumbo moons, or in some such exotic, slightly scuzzy planetary environment.
What are we looking for, exactly, when we search for alien life? What is life?

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Scientists should be peering through microscopes, not telescopes, to find life on other planets, says a report by the National Academies' National Research Council issued today. The report urges more research on Earth--both in the lab and in extreme environments such as Yellowstone's boiling hot springs--in order to understand the potential for life based on chemistry that differs drastically from our own. Without such work, the report warns, future searches run the risk of finding life in space but not recognising it.

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The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems
The search for life elsewhere in the solar system and beyond should include efforts to detect what scientists sometimes refer to as "weird" life -- that is, life with an alternative biochemistry to that of life on Earth -- says a new report from the National Research Council.  The committee that wrote the report found that the fundamental requirements for life as we generally know it -- a liquid water biosolvent, carbon-based metabolism, molecular system capable of evolution, and the ability to exchange energy with the environment -- are not the only ways to support phenomena recognised as life.  

"Our investigation made clear that life is possible in forms different than those on Earth"  - committee chair John Baross, professor of oceanography at the University of Washington, Seattle, US.

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Extreme lifeform
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From the deepest seafloor to the highest mountain, from the hottest region to the cold Antarctic plateau, environments labelled as extreme are numerous on Earth and they present a wide variety of features and characteristics. Investigating life processes in extreme environments not only can provide hints on how life first appeared and survived on Earth (as early earth was an extreme environment) but it can also give indication for the search for life on other planets.

To examine these issues and other matters the European Science Foundation (ESF) has published a 5smile.gifage report Investigating Life in Extreme Environments A European Perspective. Among other issues, the report has stated how global changes in the recent decades have turned some environments setting into becoming extreme conditions for the normal ecosystems (e.g. acidification of the oceans). Therefore the understanding of tolerance/adaptation/non-adaptation to extreme conditions and ecosystem functioning are able to help predicting the impact of global change on biodiversity.
This report is resulted from an ESF inter-committee initiative involving the Marine Board (MB-ESF), the European Polar Board (EPB), the European Space Science Committee (ESSC), the Life Earth and Environmental Sciences Standing Committee (LESC), the Standing Committee for Humanities (SCH) and the European Medical Research Councils (EMRC). This interdisciplinary initiative considered all types of life forms (from microbes to humans) evolving in a wide range of extreme environments (from deep sea to acidic rivers, polar regions or planetary bodies).
A series of recommendations were made from a large-scale interdisciplinary workshop (128 participants) organised in November 2005 with an additional workshop organised in March 2006. They have identified interdisciplinary (listed below) and disciplinary research priorities.

Recommendations:

Cross-cutting Scientific Recommendations

* Identify and agree on i) model organisms in different phyla (a group that has genetic relationship) and for different extreme environments; and ii) model extreme environments
* Favour an ecosystem-based multidisciplinary approach when considering scientific activities in extreme environments.
* Foster the use of Molecular Structural Biology and Genomics when considering life processes in extreme environments

Cross-cutting Technology Recommendations

* Laboratory simulation techniques and facilities (e.g. microcosms) should be wider developed and made available to the scientific community.
* Develop of in-situ sampling, measurement and monitoring technologies. The assessment and use of existing techniques is also recommended.
* Adopt a common approach (specific to research activities in extreme environments) on technology requirements, availability and development.

Structuring and Networking the Science community

* Favourise interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches between scientific domains and between the technological and scientific spheres.
* Create as soon as possible an overarching interdisciplinary group of experts to define the necessary actions to build a critical European mass in the field of Investigating Life in Extreme Environments
* Improve the information exchange, coordination and networking of the European community involved in scientific activities in extreme environments.


The report also includes recommendations specific to i) Microbial life, ii) Life Strategy of plants, iii) Life Strategy of animals and iv) Human adaptation.

This report is downloadable here.

Source : European Science Foundation

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PRESS RELEASE

THE LIMITS OF ORGANIC LIFE IN PLANETARY SYSTEMS, a new report from the National Research Council, examines the search for life elsewhere in the universe and whether the fundamental requirements for life as we generally know it are the only ways phenomena recognised as "life" could be supported beyond our planet. Whether "weird" life, as scientists sometimes refer to life with a different biochemical structure than life here, should be considered in the search for extraterrestrial life is looked at in the report.
The  report will be published on Friday,  6th July.

 www.nas.edu

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